Here at Appril, we celebrate the launch of new apps in the store and shine a light on the brilliant minds who bring these ideas to life. This time, we’re excited to feature the Wasabi team, an indie duo made up of a developer and a designer. Discover the story behind their latest app and how they turned their vision into reality. Read on to learn more!
Line up!
Line Up is one of the latest apps we launched. It’s basically a concert wallet, but as we love music and like cool esthetics, we wanted it to be more than that. We developed an app that should be cool to show in the line to a concert, something you can be proud to show off with.
We start with those basics
And then we progress with what would be useful. For Line Up, we agreed tickets are valuable items and prone to theft and misuse, so we encrypt them in the app. We keep them locally stored on your device and only accessible by your means of security (i.e. a fingerprint, code, etc). When we go to a concert, we have to turn our screen brightness up usually for the tickets to be scanned, so we let the app do that automatically, and it goes back to your prefered settings when you exit the tickets.
That is basically what we try to do for all our apps. We have an idea and we keep thinking what would be useful to us, and it might be useful to others as well. We mix our passions, or interests and a lack we find (or cannot) in the app stores. Some apps are just too expensive, have weird paywalls, annoying ads or just don’t look nice enough. So we develop it ourselves.
Our latest app is just a fun free app (Ready, Set, Start!) to choose your starting player with when playing board games/tabletop games. And from there, new ideas sprout. Can we make something cool for DND players as well? And we consult friends who play and see if we can help them out
The team, we are a family
When I talk about “we” I talk about myself and my husband Rick. I’m a web and digital designer, and my husband is a software dev. A while back our first app idea came from his tattoo artist, who wanted an app to pick and match colors with the available tattoo ink he had. Rick started to dabble in Flutter, and I started to think about mobile design, which is a whole new beast since you have so little room.
After launching the tattoo app, back then called Irezumi, we developed a crochet app, as Nienke was crocheting a lot in the pandemic, and couldn’t find an app she liked. Since then, our active uses for Pocket Crochet have soared to over 50.000. We get loads of feature requests and try to email everyone back. When feature requests are returning or seem practical to us, we try to implement them as well as we can.
Just Can't Get Enough
Up to now, we have developed 12 apps in total. Of course, they aren’t all successful, and some were just fun to build. Some are not online at this moment because they’ve become redundant or replaced, but every one of them made us gain more experience and focus.
As we don’t believe in using ads, we use tiered upgrades for functionality we deem extra. In most cases, the base app remains free.
As with everything, the more experience you gain, the faster you can build and launch, and Rick and I now pretty much have a flow how we approach a new app idea. There’s a sense of magic when we look each other in the eye and decide to build something new.