6 Brilliant App Concepts You’ll Wish Were Real
Yes, Snapchat, Instagram and Evernote are brilliant, but how many fantastic app ideas miss the boat? We’ve put together a list of the best app concepts that haven’t quite (yet) made it to The App Store and Google Play. Let us know which of these apps you’d download in a heartbeat in the comments. Who knows? Maybe you’ll inspire these designers to move forward with their great concepts.
1. Team Player App concept by Adrienn Nagy
Adrienn Nagy
Remember when you were a kid a the whole block would get together for a massive game of tag? When everyone gathered on Sunday afternoons for tackle football in the park. And the neighbor was treated like a god because he had the only inflated basketball on the street. Turns out that stuff doesn’t exist when you get older. You don’t even make eye contact with your coworkers, much less know the whole block, Sunday afternoon is obviously now a reserved nap time and there’s no reason to treat your neighbor like a god, he’s your landlord, therefore he is Satan.
If you miss the impromptu games of tag and pick-up basketball that were so prevalent in your youth, or just want to yell at somebody without becoming the week’s water cooler gossip topic, Adrienn Nagy has an app concept for you. The Team Player App would help connect those who love team sports, but are missing the team. It would allow users create an event like pick-up basketball, set a location and make the event searchable. Other users looking for a game would then be able to see the events around them for a given sport, and find a place to get their ball on. See the Team Player concept on Behance for more on connecting lovers of team sports.
2. Out & About concept by Sarah Lawrence
Sarah Lawrence
Picture this: you’re out on the town after a few brews at the local watering hole when you come across the greatest bumper sticker of all time:
Now what? This isn’t something you can just walk away from, the owner of this vehicle could be your long lost soul mate. But who knows when she or he will return? It could be hours. Or maybe this person has just embarked on a tour of every miniature diorama exhibit in Denmark; that could take years.
Paste’s very own Sarah Lawrence developed the Out & About App concept to solve that very problem. You see a car with a funny bumper sticker, a Georgia ‘Dawgs fan sticker or a clever custom license plate. If they were a fellow Out & About user, you could snap a picture of their small Out & About barcode to connect and write them a note. The Out & About concept would also be useful to let drivers know their lights are on, their windows are down or their parking meter has run out, allowing anyone to be a good samaritan without having to find the vehicle’s owner. Check out the full rundown of the Out & About App concept on Sarah’s blog.
3. Trekd concept by Thomas Le Corre
Thomas Le Corre
The fall of the travel agent coincides nicely with the rise of the travel book. A trip to Rome is impossible without your Foder’s Guide. And how would anyone eat in Beijing without a ZAGAT book in hand. The problem, however, is that no single guidebook covers every step of your trip. And once you figure out the London events, museums, sites and pubs that have to be visited, your on your own for scheduling those events and keeping track of the itinerary. The subsequent jam-packed vacation days leave you looking like you ran with the bulls in Pamplona and feeling like you swam with sharks in Cape Town on what was supposed to be a relaxing trip to Paris.
For the frazzled traveler, Thomas Le Corre designed the Trekd concept app. Enter your destination and Trekd provides you with the food, entertainment and culture that can’t be missed. A user could then begin to plan out their schedule day-by-day. Set waypoints for the trip and attach notifications to particular locations. Traveling with a group? A user could invite others to take part in the Trekd planning. Check out the Trekd concept on Behance for the full feature list.
4. CarKit concept by Denny Moritz
Denny Moritz
Maybe 2014 was the year of the quantified self, but we’re ready for 2015 to be the year of the quantified everything. And where better to make quantified go further than at your car? Maybe you can keep track of Eco Score and MPGs to appease the environmentalists, mileage and service status if you’re a penny pincher, or if you’re a social butterfly, see where our friends are and what they’re driving.
Better yet, with Denny Moritz’ CarKit concept you could have it all; the full stack of your quantified car at your fingertips. A CarKit user might track total mileage, mileage since last service and eco score, and then have the opportunity to drill down and see, for example, the effect of braking and acceleration tendencies on Eco Score. Moreover, Moritz’ has envisioned a social component for CarKit where driving aficionados could catch up with friends out on joyrides and keep up with their driving stats. Check out the CarKit concept on Behance to see how Moritz would quantify the car.
Jin Yoon
According to entrepreneur.com, people ages 18 to 36 check their phone 43 times a day on average. Are those millennials furiously checking off their to-do lists in Evernote, tidily responding to emails and relentlessly micro-managing their calendar for every ounce of productivity? Or are they liking pictures of chunky babies on Facebook, hanging on every @tinynietzsche tweet and drooling over exquisite sushi pictures on Intagram? You guessed it, probably the latter.
Jin Yoon, however, has designed the AIM! app concept to turn the procrastinator into a well-oiled, productive machine. The self-tracking app would allow a user to determine what percentage of their phone usage is productive. Take a peek at Facebook—point social. Make a note on Evernote—point productive. At the end of the day, the points could be tallied to determine if the user has met their productivity goal. Additionally, the user could tell which productive and social apps get the most use during the day to being to change their habits. Head over to Behance to see the full breakdown of the AIM! app concept.
6. DO concept by Florian Pollet, Remi Lagast and Clement Casanas
Florian Pollet, Remi Lagast and Clement Casanas
Getting motivated to run is hard—Zombies, Run! made you run for your life. Learning a language is tough—Duolingo and Mindsnacks made Francais tres amusant. Gamifying difficult tasks has become an industry in itself. The most daunting, and perhaps least often completed, tasks in life may be those of The Bucket List. Go skydiving, eat an insect and learn Mandarin; these goals get more and more difficult as work and family take center stage. But what if you could earn points for turning these dreams into realities, compete with friends to be the first to achieve a shared lifelong goal and climb to the top of the Bucket List Leaderboard?
With Florian Pollet, Remi Lagast and Clement Casanas’ DO APP concept, you could. The idea is to encourage users to seize the day through gamification. You might set Attend a Super Bowl as a goal worth 80XP and DO would subsequently tell you how to make that happen, let friends encourage you (or bet against you) and connect you with other DO users that have ‘Attend a Super Bowl’ on their Bucket List. An endless array of stats and measures to inspire action would help users embody the DO APP concept motto, Life’s a Game. Check out all that the DO APP concept would offer on Behance.