7 Full Stack App Ideas for Developers w/ Instructions Included

one of the most common questions people ask me is how do I come up with a good idea for a side project maybe something that looks good in my portfolio something that makes money or both it's not very easy to build something that stands out so today I present you a seven somewhat random and unusual app ideas and you're free to use these ideas to make money off them as long as you subscribe and hit the like button now before we get into the ideas there's a few things you need to know ideas are cheap execution is everything when you come up with a great idea it's probably not unique there's going to be hundreds if not thousands of other developers out there with the same idea what's not cheap is the execution that takes real-time intelligence and money now with that in mind I'm also going to show you the architectural patterns and technologies you can use to execute these ideas and we'll also talk about how to monetize them my first idea falls into the category of data aggregation where you start with some data or information and add value to it in the United States there's a very obvious schism and the way the news is reported at any given moment you can pull up CNN in one tab and Fox News on the other and you'll often find headlines that seem to come from two different universes this app idea will archive the content from both CNN and Fox News every 15 minutes allowing a user to historically scroll through the news and see how it's reported on these two different sites so it's kind of similar to the Wayback Machine web archiving service but obviously a much more specific use case and now the question becomes how do we execute this idea I would set up a scheduled pub/sub cloud function with firebase that would allow us to run a background job every 15 minutes with no js' inside that function I would use puppeteer which is a headless chromium browser to scrape the content from both Fox and CNN I would take a screenshot and then also scrape the text so we can search through it this data would then be saved in a storage bucket and at that point all you have to do is create a client-side app to view the content and that could be as simple as a calendar that allows your user to navigate to any day in history easy enough but how do you monetize something like this you could display advertisements although I think copyright ownership might be an issue here I think this idea should fall under fair use but check with your lawyer first if you're more concerned about making money you might offer web archiving as a service to companies that want to view a history of their web deployments you could bill your customers with a monthly subscription fee and my stripe course can help you do that let's move on to idea number two which falls under the broad category of building something data-driven understanding how to work with and visualize data is extremely valuable but unless you're a massive tech company acquiring high quality data can be difficult one of the best free sources is Kaggle there's all kinds of open source datasets and every year they have a big competition for March Madness basketball for this idea we use historical data to build a predictive model for next year's tournament the data of course can be visualized and would make an awesome portfolio project you could do all of this directly in kaggle or you could add your data to a data warehouse like bigquery once you have the data there you can visualize it and create a Python Jupiter notebook in the cloud in the case of bigquery you can run machine learning models directly on this data without any ml knowledge yourself and this can all be done in a Jupiter notebook and made available on the web you could monetize it by offering a premium report for people who play fantasy sports or for Vegas now let's move on to idea number three which falls into the very popular category of photo editing this idea is especially geared towards developers building native mobile apps the idea is an app that can take an image and apply artistic photo filters based on ASCII characters I was actually looking for an app like this recently and they're out there but I just wasn't satisfied with the results so there might be an opportunity to build a better app here it could work just like any other photo filter app that converts the pixels into ASCII characters or maybe you could even use emojis here here's one way you might build it I would start with a flutter app there are multiple plugins you can use to capture images from an iOS or Android device once you capture an image you can think of it as a matrix of values that range from 0 to 255 then you just need a simple algorithm that converts a pixel value to an ASCII character or emoji you can then tweak that algorithm to make multiple filters you can then monetize it by selling premium filters as micro transactions or in-app purchases and that brings us to idea number four which falls under the game category a web-based game I really like is geoguessr it takes you to a street view somewhere in the world and you have to guess where you are by finding that point on the map the closer you are the more points you get the only problem is that after you play a few games you'll have to upgrade to a membership you should definitely support independent game developers but as an alternative you might just reverse engineer the entire game one way you might tweak it is to run the games on a timer so everybody can play against each other in real time so my idea here is to create an MMO version of geoguessr that might sound a little more difficult than some of my previous ideas it's actually easier than you might think the first step is to build a web application that integrates that Google Maps draw script SDK from there you can use firebase and firestore to create a real-time instance of a game in your database that everybody can listen to you could then use a scheduled cloud function or back-end server to flip a game to active and then calculate all the scores in the background if you do build this app you'll definitely want to monetize it because Google Maps and Street View is very expensive to use at a large scale you can start by monetizing with ads but that likely won't be enough so you'll probably want to add a membership or something along those lines in fact if you're interested in building a real-time game and david east and i will be doing exactly that on his channel next week using spelt and firebase so make sure to set up a notification on his channel another great way to come up with app ideas is to look at what various api is out there offer one of my favorites is Twilio because it lets you do all kinds of creative things with voice text and fax the cool thing about their SMS API is that you can send text messages to your users or have your app serve as a middleman so users can exchange messages without actually exchanging real numbers so here's my idea an app that allows you to anonymously text someone based on their geographic proximity imagine you're at a large event and you want to text somebody without actually meeting or knowing who that person is in real life the app would allow you to send and receive messages anonymously with other users who are within a 1 mile radius to implement something like this you could start with firebase phone authentication that would give you a phone number to work with then whenever two users start a conversation you provision your own Twilio number that maps those two numbers together now in your client-side application like flutter for example you would be keeping track of the user's geographic location when the users are no longer within a mile radius of each other you destroy the mapping so they can no longer exchange messages an app like this could be monetized by limiting the number of messages that a user can send they might get the first 10 messages for free then after that have to buy credits to send additional messages now let's segue into idea number six which falls into a broad category of specialized calculators people love to fill out surveys and get useful information return back to them examples include things like net worth calculators or inia grams where you fill out a survey and get some analysis about your personality and other apps like social blade will retrieve data from a third party API then create an analysis about a social media account so here's my idea now more than ever companies need to save money you could develop a survey that takes in information about the cloud services that company is currently using you could then compare those inputs across multiple clouds like AWS Asher and GCP this could help a company implement a multi cloud strategy that offers the lowest possible pricing implementing something like this mostly just comes down to the front end you'd likely want to start with a single page application framework like angular react review and then build a highly polished set of form inputs to collect the users data once you have that data you can make a request to the cloud billing API to fetch the latest pricing now this idea might be somewhat difficult to monetize directly but it could be a great way to generate leads for consulting contracts and now we're ready for ID number seven the world is currently a crazy place and there's a ton of people working from home I'm sure the current crisis will end in the not so distant future however I don't think the trend of people working from home is going anywhere it'd be almost impossible for an individual developer to build an app that competes with something like slack or discord however these platforms allow you the developer to extend their software by building your own app they're pretty easy to build and there's a great opportunity to help out businesses that are scrambling to get everybody to work from home so here's my idea it's a video conferencing app that allows you to hold a synchronous meetings a person can start a meeting over video and then other users can respond with video as well when the meeting is over all the video clips get combined together so other users can watch it later so it's kind of like the Marco Polo app but more business-oriented and directly integrated into slack if I were to build an app like this today I'd start by looking into the AWS amplify video plug-in it seems to provide a very easy path for getting real-time video integrated into a web or mobile app and that's likely to be a very valuable thing for a lot of developers going forward I'm gonna go ahead and wrap things up there if you end up building one of these apps please let me know so we can feature it on the channel and if you want to learn how to build an app from scratch consider becoming a pro member at fire ship IO thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Fireship

Views: 491,937

Keywords: webdev, app development, top 7, idea list, app ideas, web development idea, dev projects, app projects, learn to code, cloud computing

Id: JTOJsU3FSD8

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020