or the past few days I have been unemployed. During this time I generally don’t say no to things that seem interesting to me. I treat these things as side quests, using video game terminology.
Last Friday, my brother who is pursuing CA asked for help. At his firm he was assigned to perform physical verification of assets for a company.
The work was huge. We had to travel around the city verifying assets, taking pictures of them, and recording their coordinates, along with a map snapshot overlaid on the image.
See the reference image.
The Problem
I tried several apps from the app store for this task. Most of them simply didn’t work properly. After trying a few, I finally found one that actually worked.
Unfortunately, it bombarded me with ads for virtually every click.
Generally, I don’t mind ads in free apps. If you’re offering something for free and monetizing through ads, that’s fair. But there’s a limit. Ads should not hinder the core functionality of the product you’re monetizing.
(What Microsoft is doing with their OS lately is a good example of crossing that line.)
The Solution
Even though I had to use the app for the entire day, the experience annoyed me enough that I decided to build my own version.
Become a Medium member
The goal was simple: an app that lets you take images with additional information attached, like coordinates and a map overlay.
I had previously learned React Native for a freelance project. Since I also needed the app to run on both iOS and Android, it was the obvious choice.
I managed to get a working prototype ready within an hour. After a few fixes and some small improvements, we had a usable prototype.
The app uses no external APIs, and most importantly, it does not play ads every time you touch the screen.
I used Claude and Gemini to help build it.
Some Pinch of Salt
While the app does the job, it currently uses the expo-camera library to capture images. The image quality is honestly not great.
But for a prototype, I’m satisfied.
Next Step
I’m thinking of publishing the app and spending about a week improving it so it can become a proper competitor to similar apps on the App Store and Play Store.
Conclusion
Even though a lot of software development has become commoditized, there are still apps with terrible user experiences dominating certain niches.
That’s honestly a bizarre situation.
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