App-solutely Fascinating: 40 Intriguing Facts About Mobile Apps

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1I Am Rich

I Am Rich

A featureless app called "I am rich" was released on the app store for $999.99. 8 people purchased it before apple removed it the next day.


2. Rio residents rely on an app called "Fogo cruzado" (Crossfire) to keep track of all gun battles happening in the city on any given day in order to avoid them.


3. The Virgin Hotel in Chicago has no check-in desk. It uses a smartphone system in which you scan a QR code and retrieve your room key from a vending machine. The personal comfort assistant app named Lucy can order more pillows, control room temperature, and coordinate messages with hotel staff.


4. Facebook acquired Onavo VPN to track user's full online activity and app usage details. With this, they could tell Instagram's Stories crippled Snapchat Stories even before Snapchat made it public.


5. Snapchat was originally marketed as an app to send nude pictures called Picaboo.


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6Whiskey Meetup App

Whiskey Meetup App

Instagram started as a Whiskey meetup app. After analyzing how people used it, they relaunched it as Instagram and sold it for $1 billion two years later.


7. In 2014, researchers in the UK developed an app called, "Spider in da house", which helped identify house spiders. They discovered the peak month of spiders moving indoors is September and most are males seeking mates.


8. Before the smartphone app, Shazam was a call service that let users dial 2580 to send 30 seconds of a song over the phone, and receive the name of the song via text message. The number still works today.


9. Siri was originally an app available for purchase on the App Store until Apple acquired it two months after its release.


10. There is an mp3 player, made specifically for prison inmates. It even has an app (JPay's music store) that shows songs purchased most by inmates in their prison.


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11Yo!

Yo!

The widely popular app, 'Yo!', is being used as an improvised missile-warning system in Israel.


12. There is an iPad app named Whale Alert that shippers can use to avoid hitting whales near ports. It is part of a largely voluntary program that has reduced whale/ship encounters by 81% since 2007.


13. The Halkomelem language in British Columbia is near extinction. In 2000, it was estimated that the number of fluent Halkomelem speakers was less than one dozen. Most are middle-aged or older, and few are monolingual. To save the language, a Halkomelem iPhone app (Halqemeylem) was released in 2011.


14. There are Bluetooth-enabled toilets in Japan that can flush and bidet using an app (My Satis) and anyone with the app can control any toilet within range and activate its flushing and bidet functions because all the toilets have the same Bluetooth PIN ("0000") hardcoded.


15. The predecessor to Google Lens, the Google Goggles app (now discontinued) was able to solve Sudoku puzzles in seconds.


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16Pocket Fritz

Pocket Fritz

In 2009, an app called Pocket Fritz running on a 528 MHz HTC Touch was entered into a grandmaster chess tournament and won.


17. Police organizations want to ban the app Waze because it identifies police locations and makes them potential targets for harm.


18. The successful app Line was developed as a response to Japan's 2011 earthquake, helping the Japanese facilitate communications during the disaster.


19. The French soccer team Avant Garde Caennaise is managed by over 2000 ‘virtual managers’ who watch the game in real-time and use an app (United Managers App) to decide tactics, substitutions, and line-ups.


20. OkCupid found that women using iPhones averaged twice as many sexual partners as those using Android devices.


21Tinder

Tinder

Tinder was thusly named because a tinder box (your phone) holds matches (swipes to the right) that could potentially catalyze the fire of a new romance from a single spark made by swiping matches to the right.


22. Uber drivers in China changed their profile photos to ghosts and zombie images so that when potential passengers saw these pictures they would cancel the ride they had just booked, thus earning the driver the cancellation fee.


23. A woman was diagnosed with "WhatsAppitis" in 2014 after using WhatsApp on her smartphone continuously for 6 hours caused wrist pain.


24. Language learning app/site Duolingo makes its money from having its users practice translating a real-world document (e.g from CNN). Duolingo has contracts with these websites to translate stories and is earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with this business model.


25. Since Uber was introduced in New York City in 2011, drinking-related car wrecks decreased by 25–35% in all boroughs.

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