Free (Bad) App Ideas
None of the app ideas you are about to see will ever work. I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. Obviously I wish that they would work! If they did, I'd quit my job as a line cook at Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers, drop out of school, and spend every waking moment developing them. These ideas cannot possibly be profitable and reading this to learn about them is a waste of time for you. I'm going to write about them because thats the only thing that they're good for. They aren't profitable. That's why they're useless. To prove I actually believe these will never work, I'm going to provide any half finished source code that I have from the ones I started developing and encourage you to take it (no strings attached), finish and publish it. YOU MAY DISREGARD ANY COPYRIGHTS IN THE SOURCE CODE I'VE ATTACHED TO THIS ARTICLE. It is 100% yours now!
1. Tech Help Now!
Old people cannot use technology. They can't help it. They are past the age of learning and only view it with confusion and distrust. They do not want to use technology but they need to participate in society. So they need to connect their Alexa to the internet to listen to music. They have to print out a picture of their grandchild on the swing set (in color). They need to take the videos that are saved to their digital camera (which is absolutely lower quality than their phone), put them on their computer, then email them to their friends.
Makes me roll my eyes... I could do that in like 30 seconds. The concept of Tech Help Now: old people pay young people to help them with their technology. The old people will be the clients and young people will apply to offer their services. At a price. I take a cut of the price since I'm providing a service too: Tech Help Now connects clients to solutions. It's the match maker. Since old people don't trust kids theres a review system. The kids get graded on their work. They also don't get paid until after they prove they fixed the problem.
Isn't it a great idea? Theres lots of apps that connect clients and solutions. Uber, AirBnB, Craigslist, DoorDash, all their competitors. I thought it was a great idea.
Issues:
Nobody trusts anyone. Naturally, old people don't trust kids but the kids are actually just as vulnerable. This platform would be a honeypot of scamming. Left and right people taking money from each other, lying about completion, lying about getting scammed, lying about everything. There's no way any work would get done they'd be too busy lying and cheating.
It's unfair to blame everything on users. That's just a design restraint and a good developer should be able to work inside of a design restraint. A community of trust could be created given enough time, capital, and participants. There are more problems. Kids don't even know how to use technology. The fact is halfway through development I realized that I (and probably most of this website's visitors) posses above average technology skills and as a whole Generation-Z can be considered tech-illiterate. Google Docs destroyed what should have been the most technically savvy generation ever. Even though Tech Help Now would self-select brighter individuals, it may not be enough. Some problems would be impossible to solve. What should clients do then? Even if they don't have to pay for a non solved solution, it would be an incredibly frustrating waste of time.
What an awful app it would be. I cannot imagine using it. Tech support is free online anyway. Apple has AppleCare, you can call Microsoft Support regarding your windows laptop, Nintendo Support for when your Nintendo Switch OLED starts acting up. They are all more specialized, free, have chains of escalation which you can use, and have already existed as the norm for decades.
As promised in the intro here is the project, in case you feel like wasting your time:
2. alBUMs
Social media was a great invention. We all use it all the time because it's great. It's so awesome to use social media that people are addicted in the same way they get addicted to other substances. I would love to make an app so good that it physically addicts people. My primary motive, the profit, is unlimited. Just wait until you have a large enough user base and then sell your ad space. Instagram adds more and more ads and we complain and then we open Instagram anyways. Social media could have grave implications for the future of society but in the meantime it has implications of profit. alBUMs was going to be social media for music. Specifically: collectors that like to listen to an entire album in one sitting.
I wanted people to listen to an album and then add it to their "collection". They can give it a rating of 1-5 stars, write a short review, select friends that they would recommend it to, and have an aesthetic representation of their physical album collection to use for bragging purposes. There would also be a "wishlist" gallery and moving a album from your wishlist to your collection would be a satisfying action.
If I could addict people to this app I'd be so rich! Lots of addictive and dopamine producing actions were considered:
- 3D animation when tapping on an action
- Haptic feedback
- Warm colors that wouldn't wera on the eyes
- Star rating system
- Galleries to save music to for your return
- Naturally competitive interactions with friends
- Album sharing which would mean notifications
- Simple design which would easy to maneuver.
- Having every single album you could think of
- HIGH quality album art (800x800 pixel resolution is irresponsible resource usage but amazing quality when used as a thumbnail in a grid)
Issues:
Another doomed idea. AUDIOPHILES ARE OLD. Old people seem to be a common theme in my failures. What did I do to them?? Seriously, look at this graph:
80 percent of record collectors are above 25. Everyone knows that they don't get addicted to social media. They didn't grow up with it in the same way as Generation-Z. They might as well be immune. I can't monetize an app who's users check in with it every couple weeks. Five ad views per day isn't paying the bills. Comically and sadly, a social media app full of people who don't know how to be social virtually is doomed.
I got pretty far on this one before giving up. Multiple Porsche 911s configured online ready to be ordered as soon as my first quadrillion dollars came in. I'm over it though.
3. AI Survey Bot
You know what's profitable? Breaking the law. Or at least breaking terms of service. Online survey sites pay pennies on the hour if you'll take their surveys. They want you to be serious when you take these but nobody is. Everyone clicks through as fast as they can, randomizing their selections to avoid detection. There are attention checks but just skim the question you probably aren't going to get caught.
These sites are such a waste of time. Calculate the money you make per hour and it's well below minimum wage. At least they're easy. Mind numbingly easy. The idea then is to connect the ChatGPT API to a virtual keyboard & mouse input driver and live screen recording component. Then you just tell ChatGPT to assume the opinions and beliefs of any simple stereotype. Maybe a 30 year old white woman who lives in a medium sized town in the Midwestern United States. It can absolutely do this and answer the questions in the survey while never being caught by any attention checks (since it is paying attention). Spin up a thousand of these setups and your earnings grow linearly. To make sure they all come from unique IP addresses and locations it can be an app which people download and they can keep a percent of my earnings.
Issues:
Unfortunately, you can't offer an app that does illegal acts on the App Store. You also can't side-load apps on iPhones and I have absolutely no interest in developing Android apps. Theres a bunch of terms of service which the program would break. OpenAI doesn't want ChatGPT to be used maliciously. The survey companies don't want AI data (even though it would probably respond to the questions more honestly than a human). It could go undetected if nobody used it but then it wouldn't be making me money. Another problem is that I don't think I can handle the jail time at this point in my life. I have too much going on jail would not be optimal.
I do not have any source code for this and if there was code for this on my hard drive I would say "I do not have any source code for this" because jail would not be optimal right now.