I heard him say on some podcast that he thinks there is a possibility for him to make real money on this, but I would say there isn't. Very few people care about this, and almost none of that already small group will have heard of the app.
Plus I can't even see how this simplifies anything, if you're posting to instagram it's surely simpler to skip the extra step and just use instagram's built in editor, even if you have to place the emojis yourself?
Or you could just not post those photos. What's even the point of posting a photo of your child, with the face hidden? Seems very niche. Just post another photo.
Casey Liss is a very anxious person, there is nothing wrong with that but if you make apps for people like yourself, it's an advantage to be more mainstream!
Heard the same, thought the same. Casey succumbed to the struggle I find myself dealing with all the time - he found a problem with a technological solve and solved it with technology, which is only something other technologists do or want. Like you said, Instagram has a facility to already put stickers on images for people who wish to censor their pics. If they're not using Instagram, maybe the other program can do the same, if they user even cares at all. How do you convince someone with an existing workflow to change? "Why do I need another app," they will ask you. I wish him luck and applaud the nerve to go it alone in the tech world, but I'm not sure this is a diamond waiting to be found.
As one of our VCs once wisely said to us: "The hardest thing is to get a consumer to install a new app. Deliver your solution any way other than its own app."
You may as well say, "the hardest thing is to get a consumer to sign up for yet another service". And it is hard. But that is precisely how a new consumer app would get traction. It's not like Buzzfeed where no login is required, and the only thing that matters is ad impressions.
That too doesn't sound right. Every consumer app I use begs me to use their dedicated native app on mobile. Even though I'm a signed up user on the web site. The only reason they do this is because app-level surveillance and telemetry is unblockable, whereas the web allows me to block what I want.
Yes and no; there are a few handfuls of apps that Made It in that they are only viable as apps, the ones that people will cycle through and open up multiple times a day. It is really hard to get to that point though. I mean the last ones I can think of that people installed were TikTok (similar appeal as Instagram, maybe Snapchat) and FaceApp (short lived gimmick).
I think the app gold rush is over. We've passed the time when every company "needs" an app.
Even marketing managers can look at their phones and realize, "Why do I have all of these apps? I don't even know what half of these things are for anymore?"
I recently moved, and my new building has separate apps for: Package notifications, dry cleaning pick up/drop off, paying rent, the speakers in the ceilings, building bulletin board, reserving a common space, reserving the freight elevators, maintenance requests, pet care service, doorman notifications, self-parking, valet parking, and probably a bunch more that I've forgotten because I'd rather let my wife deal with that stuff than overwhelm myself with apps.
And that's just the building. Nevermind grocery delivery, each individual utility, food delivery, restaurants, and on and on and on.
My wife is a big app person. Hates using mobile web sites. She has at least 200 apps on her phone, all obsessively organized in tiny folders. But even she has started using the web versions of things, just because having so many apps has finally become harder than clicking a bookmark in Safari.
I agree. I hesitate to use myself as a data point because I'm very sensitive to privacy and security issues (and thus often refuse to use apps that don't have a web version), but it seems like there are a lot more web options than there used to be.
Apps definitely have a place for some use cases, but for most they just have so many downsides, especially invasive privacy violations. I think of running an app as similar to running some unknown/close source binary as root on my machine. Why give an app access to a whole bunch of APIs that can be used to mine me for data when it isn't needed?
Cross platform usability is also a big thing. Any apps that require typing are much better done on a laptop or desktop with a keyboard. Why should I be forced to use my tiny phone screen and super awkward mobile keyboard to fill out a form when I have a perfectly good laptop right next to me? Why should I have to run a specific operating system (apple or android) in order to be able to fill out the form?
Few people I know still get excited about apps. The curiosity and fascination is largely over. Unless there's a compelling reason, people don't want to install "another app"
I said on Twitter that there is a very obvious revenue strategy here. Pivot from tots to thots. Thots need to post censored versions of their photos on Instagram as the top of their Only Fans funnel. It’s a business expense for them. Seed it to some influencers but ask them to leave on the watermarks and then wait for other cam girls to buy it because all their friends are using it.
But it’s relatively easy to use iOS’s markup editor. The whole time he was explaining this app all I could think was… it’s so much easier to just use the markup editor.
If you’re sharing to WhatsApp… just use their editor, it allows adding stickers and emojis natively, it doesn’t auto detect faces… but is that strictly necessary?
For double points, if you don’t wanna share on WhatsApp you can still use their editor and just send it to yourself. Now you are still only using one app, and the new photo is saved automatically to your camera roll.
I kind of hate-listen to ATP at this point, as the only one who lives in the real world is Siracusa…
…but this is actually not easy to do via the iOS markup editor. It defaults to a pencil tool that draws way too fine of a line to mask a face without a loooot of scribbling, and adding a shape is a lot of taps. And text, forget about it, that's a pain in the default iOS editor. (Instagram: way better at this.)
This is a weird niche of a tool—it's for people who are posting photos to the Instagram timeline where you can't use the built-in stickers feature, or sending a lot of photos via Messages. But for this tiny niche: sure, useful.
Siracusa is great to listen to since he can make very complex subjects seem simple. His writing with Ars was similar. I listen to his other podcast and wish there was a way to mute his co-host so I only heard John. Despite the rambling, incoherent interruptions from said co-host, I still listen to the podcast because the value in listening to Siracusa outweighs the pain from MM.
Can you do it in the default photo editing app? Don't have any iOS devices handy to check out, but on my current phone, the standard Google Photos app has text markup - including emojis.
Just tested it out and I was easily able to put an emoji over a face and resize/rotate it with pinch/drag type motions. Anything like that in the default Apple app?
Granted, there is nothing like the automation features in OP's app, so at least that part is interesting.
If you insert a photo into Messages and hit Markup, the first view gives you a bunch of pen/pencil/brush options, with fixed sizes per brush. There's a plus button that allows you to insert shapes and text…but you can't pinch-zoom to scale the text. You then have to tap around again to set the font size and color.
It's a weird, neglected-feeling interface. They could borrow a lot from Instagram's story editor.
What the author of the app can do however is creating an <x-Apple>OS photo markup plugin that provides the more usable mask ‘aid’ tools. A feature I haven’t seen utilised once since it’s inception.
> What's even the point of posting a photo of your child, with the face hidden? Seems very niche.
Might be a cultural US thing, but this is something my wife does a lot and I see a lot of people doing. It's one of those things that might not make sense if you don't have kids.
I have kids, and don't mind posting their photos. But if I did, why post at all? It just seems weird. "Here's my son, minus the face. Oh he's so cute!"
I also find it bizarre and think similarly... if you're going to cover up the person's face, why post it at all?
I have seen some people use these on dating apps where they don't want their own children's or other people's children's faces to be visible. I understand that use case a bit more from a privacy perspective.
For some, its not about the kids its about showing themselves as a parent.
For others, its about sharing with people that you know that you and your kids had a good time while providing some privacy protection for your kids. Micro-managing who can see what picture is hard, the people that know your kids get the full mental image from the picture.
> the people that know your kids get the full mental image from the picture.
Maybe it's just me but this kinda thing seems a little weird. If it's too much work to partition into groups then maybe not post at all?
But then again I'm not doing any social networks so I guess I'm not the intended audience.
I also didn't get this. Why put photo's on social media of your kids AT ALL if you feel weird about it. Making them look weirder feel a bit strange to me. But now you point out that is basically to enable virtue signalling for parents its makes more sense.
My in-laws foster and this is the first use case I thought of. It’s sad to take a big family photo and either not be able to share it, or have to take a duplicate without the foster child.
To be fair their podcast has two programmers and a stay at home dad so it makes sense why he only had focus on his kids. The app isnt worth .99 cents though with questionable utility and a plethora of other apps that do this for free.
Two of them are working programmers though and, in my opinion, much stronger programmers. I just think it's clear why he thought this was a valuable app idea.
I think it's like a preference - I don't understand it either, but I've seen it enough times that I don't think it matters whether I understand. Some people like it.
It makes total sense. I don't have kids, but I certainly understand that they aren't old enough to understand the principle of consent when it comes to being photographed for pics that will be shared online by their parents.
So blurring them out somehow protects privacy and lets parents their habitual social media posting.
I think it's not just US thing, I've seen parents did the same thing outside US.
There's a market for this but urgency is probably low, fortunately this got viral
You also have to consider the modal, a one time 99 cent purchase. As much as a despise all those apps with subscriptions, it's the only way for an app like this to bring in the dough.
That is not so say what the developer here did was wrong, I commend him for having the integrity to not reach for a "99cents/month" subscription, but that is unfortunately where all the money is unless you have a high volume app.
It's not an attack, it's just a statement. If one purpose is to appear employable, he should not mention that it took him 6 months to write it because that is just too long.
It's one thing to "write an app" and something else completely to bring it to a standard consumable by lay users.
Having published and maintained an app that is in active use by even a couple hundred users gives you an advantage in employability and quite a big one at that.
Your post makes it seem like you have neither published an app yourself nor hired single devs who have, and it's easy to not appreciate.
From reading your comments it seems like you're hoping or at least expecting this app to fail, not because it's bad, but because of what you think about the personality of the creator. It's weird and seems pretty toxic. You don't like the app, say what's bad about the app, don't shit all over the creator.
When someone says they spent N months on something, that's not total clock time they spent in the code editor. It means they built it over the course of N months. You actually have no idea how long it took them.
It isn’t his full time job. He was doing it as a side project
He’s on a 3 person podcast that could very well gross over $850K a year - 3 ad reads * 5500 * 52 weeks a year [1]. I wouldn’t make doing an app a high priority either.
Not long after that, they talk about how the first version of the app that had all the functionality was done much earlier, and the rest of the time was due to him doing pass after pass improving the UX (and time off for the holidays). That's incredible dedication and I honestly think it reflects well on him.
Have you tried the app? The UX is not that good, you can't resize and move the emojis at the same time, you have to choose one task at a time. Plus you need to put both fingers inside the rectangle it seems, there should be a very generous touch area outside the emoji itself.
Most corporation don’t hire iOS developers because of their great UX skills. They have an entire department to worry about the look and feel of the app.
Heck Marco, his cohost, has been very successful first with Instapaper and then with Overcast. He will be the first to admit that his UI skills aren’t that great.
It’s not like Tumblr - he was the initial developer - was ever a thing of beauty.
I recently saw a friend post photos like this on FB. She was visiting her sister and blocked the sister's kids' faces. She didn't block the faces of her own kids, who are much older. Made sense to me! I don't know how often I'd use the app, but I've just downloaded it. I'm sure my kids would have fun playing with it, regardless!
Guess you have no idea with what apps you can make money :)
If you have a decent app and good pricing you can convert something between 1-5% of downloads to paying customers. With his audience and reach he can easily make real money. Probably not life changing, but still a few hundred bucks each month.
He said on a podcast that he spent "6 months" developing it. I very much doubt that was 6 months of full-time work, but even if that was only 10 hours a week, and even if the "cost" was let's say $100 (probably much more) an hour, that's around $25k or 7 straight years of $300 a month (that never goes down for 7 years, aka impossible) to recoup his investment. That's an absolute low end, I think you could easily argue the cost was 4x that, which means it would take 28 years of sales that never dip to break even.
There's no possible way he could make anything besides less-than-nothing level money at $300 a month or anything close to that amount.
As he explained on his podcast, this project was designed to solve his own problem. The problem with apps designed to solve your own problem is that very often, your problem is not 1) shared by others willing to pay or 2) you don't solve the problem in the same way others want to solve a problem.
Just for reference, $25K spent in time and then being able to talk intelligently about modern iOS development on a podcast that generates $16K an episode seems like a good investment.
And “time isn’t money”. It wasn’t like the time he spent developing it would have been spent working on something else.
He spends maybe 1% of the time talking about his apps, that really isn’t the reason.
And time is definitely money, or rather, money is time. If you already have an income stream that is more than enough for your chosen lifestyle, spending lots of time on something that might give you a tiny bit extra seems like a bad choice. Why not spend time with his family, travel, take up a hobby, or at least write an app that is just for fun. Or one that has some sort of chance of making it really really big. Obviously up to him, but still, hard to understand.
Programming is a hobby for him. He’s also not traveling. He has two small non Covid vaccine eligible kids. Hardly any Indy app has a chance of making any money in todays App Store.
I know lots of pseudonymous people on Twitter who have large enough followings that they don't want to share their face or real name, and I've seen them do this sort of thing
This is a little strange to hear, since it's genuinely not possible (as far as I can tell) in the main part of the app. Stories, yes, but not in the feed.
It's as if people use these things in wildly divergent ways, I guess.
I did actually skim through other apps that've been linked in the thread, and I didn't see one that seemed like a direct competitor with the combination of emoji + automatic face detection. Granted, this could be me defining the market too narrowly, and many people might get by without one of these just fine.
(My own App Store searching turned up one called Face Blur which seemed to have emoji as an option... as a subscription, which seems like a non-starter.)
I'm not sure why a bunch of commenters are dismissing the idea of hiding faces by placing emoji over them. That's already a thing. I see it a lot on photos that are shared online. It's a good alternatives to having to carefully frame or crop an image to hide objects and faces you don't want others to see.
As a parent of a preschooler I can confirm this is definitely a thing. We have decided to do what we can to avoid our child’s life being subject to data mining or the creation of shadow profiles by whatever company (past or present) thinks it can profit from it. We always cover his face with an emoji. So do most of the parents in our social circle.
Given that it’s mostly used on Instagram: sure! It’s a picture-first medium after all. Obviously portraits are rare, but it’s quite common to see posts of their kids doing something adorable with just the tiny portion of the picture that contains a face covered. Plenty remains to see.
Nice implementation! We made a similar app a couple of years ago as part of a hackathon project but we never really polished it to submit to an app store
How do you feel about the fact that yours has been out for a couple years, does essentially the same thing (although maybe has less appealing marketing images on the App Store TBH), and only has a handful of ratings compared to the 300+ for this new app from this popular podcaster? I ask sincerely, and I wonder if it speaks to the power of marketing.
I think it does speak to the power of marketing but that can mean a lot. I’m also not out here trying to get ratings, I’m making things I use and publish them because I think others will too. That’s why it’s free and ad free (and admittedly slow to update).
True, but it's honestly pretty fiddly. If you want to do exactly-this, adding an emoji is a pain because you have to jump through a few hoops to resize it -- pinch-dragging doesn't work.
This is such an obvious thing now that I see it. Great idea and execution. One might argue this should be a feature available natively, and a valid use-case for face-detection other than identification and tagging.
Is the app simple? Yes. Do you have to purchase it? No.
Not sure why this turned into a critique of the programmer and subsequently his podcast and co-hosts.... weird.
Added a picture with a bunch of people. Not all of them got an emoji, so as I continued to add emojis, I wanted to pinch to zoom but that behaviour turned out to be for the emoji. Handling a tiny emoji was really add, so I’d appreciate be able to zoom in and out of the picture when I have to add more emojis :)
The privacy of others was the original use I came up with when I made this same app for my final project in Intro to iOS class in grad school way back in 2017. From my initial project proposal
>Governments and tech companies such as Facebook are now continuously scanning
all photos uploaded to the internet for faces, locations, and objects, effectively
removing anonymity for anybody that is in any picture. A user might want to share a
picture from a protest, but other users in the background might not want it known
they were there.
>I would like to make a privacy focused camera application. The application will
allow the user to take a picture and then it will find the faces in the picture. The user
then will have to tap on the individuals in the photo they would like to be included
in the final picture. By default all the faces in the picture will be marked as discard.
After the user has finished selecting the faces the final picture will be produced. The
faces not selected will have an effect applied to them to obscure that person identity.
The user will then have the ability to share the photo to other applications, such as
Twitter.
There is a lot of code in the standard library that includes face detection, didn't even have to add any libraries and was able to do the project in the last 2 weeks of class. I ended up putting a heavy mosaic over the faces, but emojis would have been just as easy. Still preferred Android dev over iOS after it, but was impressed with the included camera features.
To me the use case seems weird that she is trying to hide her kids so she can constantly post them on Instagram, when she has full control over taking pictures of her kids and what she puts on her page.
In addition to emojis, imagine if this had deep fake support. For the war protestor use-case imagine if everyone in the crowd having the face of Zelenskyy.
It'd be nice if this was usually built into whatever social media app people use but I wouldn't trust most social media companies to not store the original image.
A sea of mini Nickolas Cage faces in pictures of your child at a playground would entertain some people.
Why? I’ve never understood this practice. The number plate is already out in public nearly 24/7 anyway, what difference does it make if it’s unobscured in a photograph, unless it’s a stolen car or plate or something?
In countries like Switzerland where we have strict privacy laws you can not just post pictures online of cars plates that may expose someone's privacy.
For example a parking lot at a cancer hospital. The owner of a car can be identified by plate and therefore you need to make sure you don't expose them possibly having cancer etc.
It’s not too difficult to use that information to find out where the car probably parks at night. The difference being the odds of a random finding the car plate useful vs online an abuser, criminal is higher.
Where I struggle with this is on the basis of the idea. At this point why not turn everyone into a Holo Live character or some other metaverse style creation? Our face is part of who we are and removing that feels very unnatural to me.
the app is simple and clever... tho, you should NOT post personnal stuff on social platforms, do NOT post pictures of your kids ... the internet has become a dreamland for pedos and psychos
I agree, but only a small % of parents are going to refrain from the temptation to share pics widely, and that means online. So this app has a very beneficial use case.
First mover advantage, but it'll only take off if you work really hard in the first month or so to get the word out and become a 'household name'.
That said, yeah it's likely there will be competitors springing up left and right if it becomes popular (recent example is this "unpacking" game, the app store was flooded with clones within a month). For apps like this, your best hope is probably that a bigger party like Instagram knocks on your door and offers to buy you out to integrate the feature into their own apps. It's cynical, but this is where we find ourselves; I don't believe single feature apps have much of a future.
A photo manipulation app (generally speaking) is great, but unless you add a social network to it like Instagram did it's not going to go far.
I don't get the use case at all. Just stop sharing images of people.
We are living in backward times indeed. What is next? The social app that makes you anonymous?
Plus I can't even see how this simplifies anything, if you're posting to instagram it's surely simpler to skip the extra step and just use instagram's built in editor, even if you have to place the emojis yourself?
Or you could just not post those photos. What's even the point of posting a photo of your child, with the face hidden? Seems very niche. Just post another photo.
Casey Liss is a very anxious person, there is nothing wrong with that but if you make apps for people like yourself, it's an advantage to be more mainstream!