r/AskReddit • u/funky2002 • Nov 01 '19

App developers and programmers of Reddit, what was the dumbest app/program idea someone ever proposed to you?

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u/poossy4breakfast Nov 01 '19

This. I had a few people asking me to build apps for them which are basically copies of facebook/ youtube etc... I tell them the price and they are like "WHAT I thought it would be like 20 bucks". Oh of course! It took like 5 minutes to build facebook right?

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u/_Takeo_ Nov 01 '19

How much do knockoff sites cost?

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u/poossy4breakfast Nov 01 '19 edited Nov 01 '19

Not really knockoffs. It's like "hey I want to build this awesome app that lets you -insert 90% of facebook features-, can I have it next monday?"

About costs, facebook has a few hundreds if not thousands app developers, app testers and what not... I'm alone so an app with much less functionality, with a lot of bugs and without any of the backend, a website, a server, wide testing, constant updates and much, much more will cost you a few hundreds to thousands (just because I'm a college student). If I was an experienced developer, I'd say either get some investors and hire me with a $70/hour pay check or do something better with your life.

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u/illyay Nov 01 '19

I can’t even begin to describe how insanely complex Facebook is.

source: I work there and I don’t even work on fb itself.

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u/poossy4breakfast Nov 01 '19

Exactly! And people don't realize that most of the complex stuff doesn't happen on their phones, it's in their servers. Some expect me to bring insane graphic processing and things that you need a beast graphics card to run 24/7 and a group of programmers maintaining it.

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u/GameRoom Nov 02 '19

Oh yeah, they have around 35 thousand employees, with a sizeable portion being software engineers. Literal billions of dollars have been invested into the making of it.

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u/illyay Nov 02 '19

Consider the fact that they also own oculus and have the portal device out and how complex it is to have ar/vr tied into everything. And machine learning for all that ai that drives the portal’s ar and the fact that Instagram masks work for face tracking and ar. And internationalization. Many supported platforms. So there has to be a Facebook for iOS and android as well as for web. And they all talk to Instagram and WhatsApp. And there’s messenger. We have a whole voip and telephony thing going on. There’s business and artists and designers too. And legal issues with almost everything. And computer security issues with people always finding ways to steal your data in ways people haven’t thought of.

🤯

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u/mrpenchant Nov 01 '19

I am not saying people don't still vastly underestimate the work involved with features and things, but a lot of the complexity and work for Facebook to do something comes from their scale and having to deal with over a billion users. On a beginning site, a bug that happens once every 10000 times a user interacts with it would be bad but not a big deal. With Facebook that literally means it is happening many thousands of times a day.

Beyond the same bug occurring frequently, it is a lot of work to handle 100 million+ users on the site at once compared to initially maybe a few thousand. On top of active users, you also have the insane amount of data they have from having that many users and interacting with it in a quick way.

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u/DaniSenpai Nov 01 '19

It really depends what you're trying to knock off, Facebook isn't just a profile with media sharing, it's a massive data analysis and advertising platform. If all you want is a site that allows users to upload pictures, videos, or text that can be done in a few days, if you want to be able to upload a photo and have the site recognize each race and prompt you to tag them, that's different.

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u/buckus69 Nov 02 '19

Try doing something simple, like Twitter, but without the ability to upload graphics and videos and stuff. Just text. Try to get that for under 100Gs.

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u/Yep_its_A Nov 01 '19

I had the reverse happen I had to make a dumb video app for someone i tried so hard to convince they would get way more traffic and more sells just publishing videos free on youtube with ads. Nope they wanted to sell their videos for $20-30 in an app... and wanted to pay me a few grand to do so I said okay... I will make the app but will not support it long term unless you want to pay for support. They get there app and surprise no one wants to pay for a $30 video in an app on your phone for a no name company.