2019 review, a year of effort and success

Pol Villaverde / Uncategorized / 22/12/2019

2019 review, a year of effort and success

by Pol Villaverde / splashapps / 22-12-2019

Doing a year review when December is almost over isn’t something specially original. But that doesn’t mean we are not going to do it because it is in fact a useful way of gaining perspective and seeing how things have gone. What’s more, doing reviewing one’s year is a basic step to think about the future, adjust the goals and find sense to what we do. So hereby we’ve condensed 2019 for splashapps.

It’s been a long path until the results we are presenting, would you like to read our story? Find out more.

How things began

The first months of the year were influenced by a peak in our Kuku Kube game installs. Also during the first half of the year, we faced the task of updating the design of several apps, which needed to be renewed. The new and attractive esthetics of Kuku Kube and Tic Tac Toe Colors caused an increase in the amount of downloads. Later on, at the beginning of summer, we published a new app at Google Play and named it SimpleTorch. It consists of an emergency flashlight that activates the phone’s flash and can emit the SOS morse code.

It was during summer when great novelties arrived, which would have a big impact on the company. Firstly, we took the decision to build a new website and buy a domain, splash-apps.com Similarly, we opened some more professional specific e-mails using the new domain. One of the most important novelties for the website was the Blog section, where we post articles on all sorts of different topics because we do make apps, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still interested in the rest of the world, right? We’ve talked about 3D printing, about tricks to administrate an Instagram profile, about the necessary steps to open a business and many other things. The new website came along a change in our brand image: more attractive, modern and solid than the former. Despite the changes, white and blue remain to be our characteristic colors.

This year’s big hit

However, all those changes where nothing compared to the achievement of a great milestone, the collaboration with a popular Instagram meme account, @Unidestroyer. With that project, we worked on the creation of the definitive “Never have I ever” classic party game. In addition, we developed and designed and developed a paid version, our first app available on the App Store for iOS devices. The process was long and implied many hours of work but we finally published both apps on September 4^th 2019. It was an absolute success. In a few minutes, the website server collapsed and we appeared at the top grossing rankings both at Google Play and the App Store. Thousands of users received very positively the app and rated it with 5 stars, helping us to reach number 1 in the top sales ranking for Spain. Number 1 in Spain and top 10 in many European countries and the world.

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Since then, our activity has been centered in the preparation of app updates but the effort has been worth it, it can already be said that our app is a usual colleague for parties! Several popular Instagram Catalan instagramers mentioned the app in their stories and contributed with their own content to the app, which already has 3 unique game modes and +450 epic sentences to have fun.

Present stats and future goals

Finally, during November and December, the downloads of our first app, Tic Tac Toe Colors, skyrocketed with hundreds of daily new users. When compared to 2018, app installs have increased by 265%, due to an especially good last quarter. We’ve reached more than 67.000 installs!

As of our goals for 2020, we want to consolidate our “Never have I ever” app in Catalan as a reference in Catalonia and keep gaining new users. Also, we hope to replicate this successful model translating the app to other languages to keep growing. We have another motivating app project in mind, a capital cities quiz. Our objective is to make it as complete as possible to be able to use the structure of it to create thematic apps in very diverse fields. Lastly, we want to keep feeding our Blog with more articles like this one about very diverse and interesting topics. Let’s wrap up, then, with our best wishes for 2020 and this new decade!

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3D printing: What even is it and (why) do we need it?

Pol Villaverde / Uncategorized / 26/11/2019

3D printing: What even is it and (why) do we need it?

by Mitja Suvajac / technology / 26-11-2019

People often ask me about my hobbies, and they are always baffled when I mention that I like 3D printing and that we have some 3D printers at home. It’s like science fiction to them, you can think of something, model it on a computer, send it to the printer and have it made in a couple (a couple is a very relative term, as there have been prints that took multiple days) of hours. It does seem like it, but it’s not, it has been a real thing for more than 40 years, but in the last 5 it has become very widespread and affordable, which is a great thing.

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Why 3D printing is a thing

But before we get into why 3D printing is a cool thing, we must get to know what is it. The printing part of the name is really poorly chosen, just like the name imaginary numbers in maths, how can they exist, if they are imaginary? And a similar question arises here, how can you “print” a 3D object? To avoid this, the experts have come up with a word even more terrifying, “additive manufacturing” which does, in fact, describe the underlying logic, but sounds horrifying. So, additive manufacturing is a process where you make an object layer by layer until it gets its final shape.

Why is that interesting? Well for the past 150 years the standard has been taking a large chunk of material and slowly chewing away at it, either using a lathe or a mill. That technology evolved to CNCs, where the computer takes care of the precise movements, and only in the 1980s did humans come up with the idea of adding material instead of taking it away. I won’t bore you with the history of 3D printing, and will rather tell you what the situation is today. We have lots of very affordable 3D printers, some coming in at under 300$, which is quite fascinating, but why would an average person use such a machine?

Reasons to buy a 3D printer

The first thing that comes to mind is making random toys, which is in fact what a lot of people do. But many also find better home uses for the technology, it is used a lot in DIY computers and electronic devices, for making all sorts of cases and different mechanical parts. Speaking of mechanical parts, remember the countless times you have broken the battery cover on a remote control, and then tapped it up with duck-tape. Well with a 3D printer there is no need for that because you can just print a new part. There are also other applications for 3D printing, like making houses, printing human organs, and many others, but that is another story, and also can’t be done on a 500$ machine.

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I mentioned before, that “you can just make a new part”, which has probably upset a lot of the more environmentally aware amongst you, but it shouldn’t have. 3D printing itself is the cleanest and least wasteful production technology because it uses the exact amount of material needed, and even if some print happens to fail, the plastic used can be easily recycled, because of its purity and quality. Besides that, the production series in 3D printing can be as small as 1 part, which means complete individualisation, not the hundreds of thousands of parts that are produced in a usual injection moulding series, which also brings the waste down to practically zero.

Final thoughts

With all of that in mind, I believe that 3D printing has great potential (yes, people have been saying that for 20 years now, but no one has really tried to get it popular, so I won’t listen to them complaining). I believe that a course of it should be thought in schools after all people must know how to make things if they don’t want to be dependant on others for solving any simple task they are faced with.

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About the value of numbers and a conditional celebration

Pol Villaverde / Uncategorized / 01/11/2019

About the value of numbers and a conditional celebration

by Pol Villaverde / thoughts / 01-11-2019

Nowadays many believe that we are dehumanizing society, whether it is through technology, politics or economic administration and part of this criticizm is sustained upon the perception that everything is counted with data. A good example of this are the statistics about natural disasters, terrorist attacks or refugees whose boats sink in the Mediterranean. Used to count the victims of these phenomena by tens or even hundreds, we are immune to the real damage caused and the stories behind.

It is precisely for these reason that the image of the body of Aylan in a beach became famous worldwide, because it broke radically with the dehumanization of the refugee crisis. This is the problem of the masses, we lose perspective and gain passion when we are part of them but we are terrified by their power when we look at them from the outside. Maybe if we managed to somehow connect with that passion that unites us in a soccer pitch but to do so with all human beings we would develop a fantastic empathy to resolve problems. But let’s stick to the topic, data.

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A curious example

Numbers are expected to be objective and, indeed, they are. However, this doesn’t happen with the perspective with which we look at them. Not a long ago a piece of news claimed that a town in Catalonia had become the second richest town of Spain. So, theoretically, the average citizen of that small village was way more rich than any other point of the country. What was, then, the cause of such a sudden change in the income of the town citizens?

In fact, there was no significant increase in the earnings of the citizens. What was the true reason for the record-breaking income per capita? One person, Apparently, someone with a lot of money had decided to settle in a hose in that town and caused the unprecedented growth in the overall wealth. This is a silly yet clarifying example illustrating the previously explained idea because, as said, the average citizen income had multiplied but the town wasn’t any wealthier. Besides this curious case, the core idea of the anecdote is closely related to what we were explaining before.

To what extent is a merely quantitative analysis of things useful when it comes to determining the state of a question? No one denies the fact that an analphabetism index below 5% is and will always be better than that of an 8%, but is this really enough to state whether if a society is doing good? A reduction in the youth unemployment rate is positive but it’s not necessarily indicative of a better quality of life, it is only indicative of a greater dedication to work. What if all those work hours are at expenses of study time? What if they denote a bubble-like situation such as the one lived in the construction sector, which would leave these young men and women without future perspectives once it has exploded?

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Quantity or quality?

There are studies which try to measure the happiness index of citizens of each State by means of examining parameters such as the ones we mentioned or similar ones like the health quality and, again, income per capita. Usually the Nordic countries, ahead in terms of health systems, welfare state or educational innovation are also ahead of such rankings. That said, it is especially relevant pointing out that, simultaneously, some of these countries are also in the first positions when it comes to suicide data. It seems that we still need to perfect the systems to track happiness. Or maybe there might be certain things impossible to quantify.

Whatever the answer to that doubt is, by no means it is all about forgetting of numbers as a way of taking better decisions in a wide variety of areas, ranging all the way from politics to businesses. However, it is possible that further reflection and a rather qualitative approach is often needed.

Last month, at ‘splashapps’ we achieved 50.000 installs of our 7 apps. We’ve celebrated it but this only makes sense as long as our apps have brought something positive to the tens of thousands that have installed them. Only if our apps have enabled laughter, entertained, amused, generated friendships, helped someone to get in shape or lighten their paths, only in that case, everything will have been worth it.

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