WeMakeApps

Oh man, where to start with WeMakeApps... 

My long time buddy since high school, Jason, had started learning iOS development, and I had some experience with backend. And so we decided to make some apps! And take client work to support ourselves. I think we started with Blips and then Poundcake ((will)have their own pages in /projects) which were then brought into the WMA umbrella where we started cranking apps out. So many lessons learned and hilarious times.

Our biggest driver/grind was for the upcoming release of the first Apple Watch. Jason said we should get in on the "gold rush" by having a slew of first available watch apps on launch. Little-to-no documentation available? Have to pay for developer watches? Uh yea, LFG. 

I believe we started with the idea of Pitch Out Baseball, which was very ambitious. We even traveled up to Cupertino to a developer invite hosted by Apple where engineers were trying to help out early watchOS devs. We got some helpful tips but were ultimately told that what we were trying to do was likely not possible until later versions of watchOS (Spoiler! We eventually figured it out with some hacky workarounds!). With Pitch Out on the back-burner for the time being, we focused on on easier apps ahead of the official Apple Watch launch date.

The watch apps fell into two categories:

We built some "daily" type of apps. Quotes, facts, word of the day, verses... And then some dailies that were tied to the actual day: History Today, Born Today. Probably the coolest one here was History Today. We scraped the full year's worth of "On this day/Today" from wikipedia and then presented some of the facts on watch or in-app every day. Apple reached out to us to potentially feature History Today for Apple Watch launch, but we weren't selected in the end 😞. 

My friend Duy worked at Apple and half-jokingly / half-derisively (I can only assume) decreed we make a bicycle bell app, and so we did. Only $1, and you could ring a bell of 3 different colors. From there, I think Jason expanded on that codebase to generate a ton of sound based apps. I believe the first one following was Prank Watch, with a collection of 'funny' sounds - the idea being you could leave your phone hidden in some spot and trigger the sounds from your watch at a distance. It was becoming well-known among the early watch devs that Apple was not going to approve any fart/whoopee apps (so many of us had this great idea), but somehow it wasn't noticed as one of the options in Prank Watch. We became the only available fart app on the App Store for maybe 6 months to a year before Apple relented, costing us our monopoly. Jason cloned this repeatedly (animal, explosion, sci-fi sounds, etc.) and pivoted into tuner apps for instruments.

Almost all, if not all, of our apps have been removed from sale by Apple. We never updated the apps, and after some versions of watchOS later, they were no longer compliant and removed. Some screenshots below from our App Store Connect, showing the app graveyard, units installed, and sales. No gold mine this time. Go next.