MaskerAid iOS App | Hacker News Reader

MaskerAid iOS App

caseyliss.com

273 pointsilarum166 comments

I heard him say on some podcast that he thinks there is a possibility for him to make real money on this, but I would say there isn't. Very few people care about this, and almost none of that already small group will have heard of the app.

Plus I can't even see how this simplifies anything, if you're posting to instagram it's surely simpler to skip the extra step and just use instagram's built in editor, even if you have to place the emojis yourself?

Or you could just not post those photos. What's even the point of posting a photo of your child, with the face hidden? Seems very niche. Just post another photo.

Casey Liss is a very anxious person, there is nothing wrong with that but if you make apps for people like yourself, it's an advantage to be more mainstream!

Heard the same, thought the same. Casey succumbed to the struggle I find myself dealing with all the time - he found a problem with a technological solve and solved it with technology, which is only something other technologists do or want. Like you said, Instagram has a facility to already put stickers on images for people who wish to censor their pics. If they're not using Instagram, maybe the other program can do the same, if they user even cares at all. How do you convince someone with an existing workflow to change? "Why do I need another app," they will ask you. I wish him luck and applaud the nerve to go it alone in the tech world, but I'm not sure this is a diamond waiting to be found.

As one of our VCs once wisely said to us: "The hardest thing is to get a consumer to install a new app. Deliver your solution any way other than its own app."

Yes and no; there are a few handfuls of apps that Made It in that they are only viable as apps, the ones that people will cycle through and open up multiple times a day. It is really hard to get to that point though. I mean the last ones I can think of that people installed were TikTok (similar appeal as Instagram, maybe Snapchat) and FaceApp (short lived gimmick).

I think the app gold rush is over. We've passed the time when every company "needs" an app.

Even marketing managers can look at their phones and realize, "Why do I have all of these apps? I don't even know what half of these things are for anymore?"

I recently moved, and my new building has separate apps for: Package notifications, dry cleaning pick up/drop off, paying rent, the speakers in the ceilings, building bulletin board, reserving a common space, reserving the freight elevators, maintenance requests, pet care service, doorman notifications, self-parking, valet parking, and probably a bunch more that I've forgotten because I'd rather let my wife deal with that stuff than overwhelm myself with apps.

And that's just the building. Nevermind grocery delivery, each individual utility, food delivery, restaurants, and on and on and on.

My wife is a big app person. Hates using mobile web sites. She has at least 200 apps on her phone, all obsessively organized in tiny folders. But even she has started using the web versions of things, just because having so many apps has finally become harder than clicking a bookmark in Safari.

Just curious, can your wife tell the difference between a native mobile app and an app that's mostly a webview?

Not GP, but no mine can't. She replaced the facebook app with Slim Social (which is basically FB in a web view) and barely noticed a difference between native and web view.

I agree. I hesitate to use myself as a data point because I'm very sensitive to privacy and security issues (and thus often refuse to use apps that don't have a web version), but it seems like there are a lot more web options than there used to be.

Apps definitely have a place for some use cases, but for most they just have so many downsides, especially invasive privacy violations. I think of running an app as similar to running some unknown/close source binary as root on my machine. Why give an app access to a whole bunch of APIs that can be used to mine me for data when it isn't needed?

Cross platform usability is also a big thing. Any apps that require typing are much better done on a laptop or desktop with a keyboard. Why should I be forced to use my tiny phone screen and super awkward mobile keyboard to fill out a form when I have a perfectly good laptop right next to me? Why should I have to run a specific operating system (apple or android) in order to be able to fill out the form?

Few people I know still get excited about apps. The curiosity and fascination is largely over. Unless there's a compelling reason, people don't want to install "another app"

I keep reading about websites providing more privacy. What exactly can apps do to invade your privacy on iOS without your explicit permission?

I have hundreds or maybe even thousands of apps on my phone but don’t scroll through them. I always use search or Siri to open them

That doesn't sound like it's generalizable.

You may as well say, "the hardest thing is to get a consumer to sign up for yet another service". And it is hard. But that is precisely how a new consumer app would get traction. It's not like Buzzfeed where no login is required, and the only thing that matters is ad impressions.

The point is if you can avoid making an app, that's better. Obviously if it has to be an app, then make an app.

That too doesn't sound right. Every consumer app I use begs me to use their dedicated native app on mobile. Even though I'm a signed up user on the web site. The only reason they do this is because app-level surveillance and telemetry is unblockable, whereas the web allows me to block what I want.

Of course it's better for them if the CAN make you install it. Just like it's better for a company if they can convince you to sign up for something, or at least give them your email. But the point is that if you can expose your clients to your service without all that, then you should avoid introducing the hurdle, you don't want to scare anyone off.

So: make it possible to use the service without any hurdles, but _try_ to get them to agree to as much as possible.

I would take "VC advice" with a big grain of salt...

That doesn't seem so wise. Consumers install a lot of apps. On the Google Play store, even some obscure apps have huge download numbers.

> What's even the point of posting a photo of your child, with the face hidden? Seems very niche.

Might be a cultural US thing, but this is something my wife does a lot and I see a lot of people doing. It's one of those things that might not make sense if you don't have kids.

I have kids, and don't mind posting their photos. But if I did, why post at all? It just seems weird. "Here's my son, minus the face. Oh he's so cute!"

I have a friend who does this for her foster kid(s).

My in-laws foster and this is the first use case I thought of. It’s sad to take a big family photo and either not be able to share it, or have to take a duplicate without the foster child.

Why do you need to do that?

Speaking as a foster parent: my agency like many have rules against posting foster kids to social media. Usually intended to help protect kid's privacy. I think the motivation comes from a handful of places, protecting kids from being exploited for likes, keeping kids privacy, but a big one in foster circles is so that people don't know you're a foster kid unless you say so. Most adults in the system take great care to not acknowledge kids if they run into them in public to avoid situations where kids have to explain to their friends, "Who is that?" and then having an awkward situation where they have to say something like, "That's my caseworker/therapist/whatever".

Some of these make sense (not that I agree with them), but don't seem peculiar to foster children. But what does this one mean?

> so that people don't know you're a foster kid unless you say so.

If you post a photo of your family and none of the children have emoji faces, why would anyone conclude that the foster child is a foster child? Because he looks different? Seems to me that emoji:ing out one child would do the opposite, draw attention to him.

EDIT: It seems we are talking about temporary arrangements, then things become clearer. Still very weird photos.

Not all foster kids come from the same ethnic backgrounds. So for example if you're Caucasian and post a picture of your family with a foster child who is Asian, or African-American etc, it can bring unwanted attention.

Not saying you're wrong at all, I have zero insight into foster care. Just trying to understand.

But why is it a problem if someone sees a family photo and notices that one kid looks different? He could just be adopted, or a friend or something. Is it something like witness protection, the children might have abusive parents that shouldn't be able to find them?

If it's a matter of not standing out, they will stand out just as much when you meet them anyway, right?

The number of people you meet in person is limited by geography. The number of people who might view a photo online is 7+ billion.

Foster kids might have abusive parents as you surmised. They might have been removed from an unsafe home, or have relatives that were denied custody and might act on a photo.

I was referring generally to the general desire for "the system" to preserve the privacy of kids in care. I think you have to look at it holistically and not just social media. We also signed agreements that we would be very careful with the information we received about our placements, they don't deserve their story being blasted around (even to close friends and family) unless it is needed for the benefit of the child, and even then only to the degree necessary.

I've been in doctor's appointments where the nurse is quizzing me on my family medical history and I've had to stop them with, "We're not biologically related and I don't know the biological history". No need for them to know the whole story.

I feel privacy for kids is really important, for a number of different reasons. (preventing kids from being exploited for likes by foster parents, preservation and ownership for them to tell their story in their way when they are ready for it, privacy, sometimes protection from relatives that don't have their best interests at heart, and probably a dozen other reasons I have never thought of.) The best default is really to keep everything private in my opinion, but obviously not every agency or foster parent will agree to all the same specifics as me.

Probably varies by location but here's what Connecticut DCF has to say about it:

> Please refrain from posting any photos or information on social media websites about the child/ren in your care. Their presence in your home should be treated as confidential information is not to be referred to on any social media websites.

https://portal.ct.gov/DCF/CTFosterAdopt/Manual/Chapter2#Scho...

Why do you care? Nearly every comment you've left here in this post has negative language. You claim to have been an iOS developer for ten years - where's your podcast? Where are your apps on the app store that you're posting publicly about? Why aren't we talking about Grustaf in this post? Find empathy. Find humility. Find more in life than being a negative person on the internet.

I asked because I didn't see why foster children specifically had to be hidden.

The reason you are not talking about me is that I'm not famous. Does that disqualify me from having an opinion? Do all opinions have to be positive? Do I have to (pretend to) believe that this app can make money? That seems pretty strange, this is not a kindergarten, grownups should be able to handle feedback even when it's not praise. If he needs empathy, he should go to his friends and family. I will just write what I believe, and that is that this is not a monetizable service, he is wasting his time.

He obviously has made a name for himself in podcasting, so he should double down on that. He is clearly not a product person, and I don't think he's a very good developer, he will do much better focusing on his strengths.

I'm curious, why do I need to have a podcast if I have been an iOS developer for 10 years, what's the connection?

lol

Yes it’s bizarre and I don’t understand it. Didn’t even realize it’s a thing.

I think it's like a preference - I don't understand it either, but I've seen it enough times that I don't think it matters whether I understand. Some people like it.

For some, its not about the kids its about showing themselves as a parent.

For others, its about sharing with people that you know that you and your kids had a good time while providing some privacy protection for your kids. Micro-managing who can see what picture is hard, the people that know your kids get the full mental image from the picture.

> the people that know your kids get the full mental image from the picture.

Maybe it's just me but this kinda thing seems a little weird. If it's too much work to partition into groups then maybe not post at all? But then again I'm not doing any social networks so I guess I'm not the intended audience.

This post made it make sense to me. It’s about the people taking the photos and some external validation thing.

I also didn't get this. Why put photo's on social media of your kids AT ALL if you feel weird about it. Making them look weirder feel a bit strange to me. But now you point out that is basically to enable virtue signalling for parents its makes more sense.

To be fair their podcast has two programmers and a stay at home dad so it makes sense why he only had focus on his kids. The app isnt worth .99 cents though with questionable utility and a plethora of other apps that do this for free.

To be accurate, all three of the hosts are programmers.

Two of them are working programmers though and, in my opinion, much stronger programmers. I just think it's clear why he thought this was a valuable app idea.

I've listened to ATP since day one. My impression of Siracusa as a programmer is limited to the few apps he's released. But he could be a fantastic programmer at his "jobby-job." Or he could just be average. We have no way of telling, despite how intelligent both his writing and his speaking on the podcast might convey.

Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, yet we don't know how good a programmer he is. He's made great money, and has strong opinions, but again, we don't know how good a programmer he is.

Casey used to have a "jobby-job" before leaving the corporate world. So he too might be a good, bad or excellent programmer. We don't know.

It's kind of like how you don't really know someone until you live with them. For programming, it's until you've worked with them and seen their code. All three of the hosts might be world class; or they might be average. But there's no way to determine who is the strongest programmer of the three.

We can debate who's been more successful selling their code, but we don't know where Siracusa works and code/app sales are a poor metric for code quality.

We obviously can't know, but hearing someone talk about something gives you an idea.

My impression is that Casey is quite weak (as in average), but meticulous.

Siracusa is almost certainly the one with the best understanding of theory, but hard to say how he is practically. He could be very good at what he's doing.

Marco also doesn't seem very strong in raw programming (he resisted Swift for half a decade, complains that it's hard to deal with, says that architecture is only for beginners etc) but obviously he can solve whatever problem he is faced with, even quite complex ones. And this is obviously what matters if you are an indie developer. That and product sense, which he is also very good at. He probably has the perfect skillset for an indie developer, better programming wouldn't make him any more successful.

I think Marco's resistance to Swift doesn't indicate anything about programming skill. Based on his low level audio programming (he hates to rely on code outside of his own), he's quite an accomplished programmer, unafraid of complex problems or reinventing the wheel when an existing library doesn't satisfy his desires. I doubt he would survive well in the world of unit tests, CI/CD, Jira and managers though. And I envy him for being able to avoid that.

Yeah, gotta defend Marco here, though I have my quibbles with him on this show. (He has the most first-worldiest of problems.)

He has gone in deep on performant low-level audio code, and how it integrates with the system APIs. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff with programmatic drawing of icons in his apps. He did a lot of good caching work back in the Instapaper days, when cell connections were almost like dialup.

He seemed to be reluctant to learn Swift, because Swift would have gotten him…what? I think he thought that Objective-C was mature, tested, comprehensible, and battle-tested in production. And it wasn’t going to change out from underneath him…which you sure couldn’t say about Swift for the first few years. You eventually had to adopt it, as Apple is moving to Swift-only, but I think Objective-C let him accomplish his goals, and a lot of the good security stuff in Swift is maybe not super relevant to his app development.

(Ugh, PHP, though…)

I love how Marco just feels like throwing money at one of life's problems is the best solution. I think he would be the first to tell you the role of luck in his success. Yes, he worked long hard hours at Tumblr, and eventually that paid off financially when Tumblr was sold. He was smart to scratch an itch when the iPhone first came out by releasing Instapaper, and smart to realize when it was time to sell it. He was smart to realize his itch for a good podcast player might be universal. So I think he's an incredible businessman who is really only limited by his unwillingness to yoke himself to a corporation.

His use of Obj-C and PHP are just as pragmatic to me. He's an expert at Obj-C and possibly at PHP, and why change? Let Swift mature, see if Obj-C becomes deprecated, and then move on. He can obviously learn new languages since he's dabbled in Rust etc.

I do wish ATP focused more on tech stuff and less on how to live your best life on Fire Island. But I enjoy it every week.

> yet we don't know how good a programmer he is

You know he is good because…

> Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast,

I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.

He's undoubtedly a world class indie developer, but we were discussing his abilities as a programmer, in the sense of writing good code. True, it's not necessarily important or valuable in life, but that is what we were talking about.

Most of the people I worked with at my FAANG job were excellent programmers, surely better than Marco, but none of them would have any chance of even coming up with a decent idea for an app, let alone carry it through and launch it. So they are absolutely useless as indie developers. It's just different skill sets.

Our definition of a “well written app” is different.

An app to me is well written if it is meets a need well enough to be successful. I would be much more impressed by an Indy developer who has a successful sustainable business without being slimy than a “FAANG” software engineer that got in because he can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.

I also know we are both talking hypothetically. If you listen to him about some of the low level audio processing he does, he’s definitely pretty good.

Before I get the expected replies, no I’m not “jealous of FAANG SWEs”. I work for BigTech myself after a very slight pivot from enterprise development.

The interview is the least demanding part, working as a software developer at an ambitious company has nothing to do with binary trees.

What does it matter which skill is more impressive? Obviously there are way fewer successful indie developers than top tier developers, and obviously life as a successful indie is way better. Yet, there is such a thing as writing high quality code, which is more or less orthogonal to being a successful indie. And that was what we are discussing.

It's a bit like being a fast runner and being a good football player. There's some connection, but it's not like the fastest runners are the best players, or the other way around. Different skills.

As to low level audio, I know what you're referring to, and it doesn't say that much really. My co-founder at my previous startup wrote a bunch of DSP code that worked, and was probably more complex than the pause removal, but he was still a pretty random developer. His code was sometimes surprisingly bad. Marco's strength is to not shy away from anything, even if it sounds scary or complex. DSP sounds complex, but it's not string theory.

You saw the part about I work at BigTech? Trust me, the code is not rocket science that the vast majority of what software engineers do at BigTech. Well at least the code that runs 2/3rds of the cloud infrastructure in existence.

Many of them could never handle the complexity of writing an entire app and maintaining the backend running on 20+ Linode VMs without the support of a trillion dollar corporation.

You really overestimate the skill and complexity of most code written by “FAANG” engineers.

FWIW, I’ve been coding for a long time (the 74 is a hint) and I started at 12 writing assembly language and spent a decade writing C including maintaining a proprietary compiler/VM for Windows CE devices.

> Trust me, the code is not rocket science that the vast majority of what software engineers do at BigTech.

Again, that is not the discussion. Nobody said that you have to write high quality code to make it in tech, or as an indie. You keep coming up with strawmen but all I am saying is that I don't believe Marco Arment writes very high quality code. That's it. No judgement, no conclusions or correlations, no nothing.

As to FAANG, I can only be certain about my own experience, and the dozen or so direct colleagues I had all wrote better code than every other colleague I've had over 10 years. Not saying they are better people, happier, richer or anything else. Just to be clear.

You're conflating smart business choices with good programming. His code could be well marketed shit that just barely works under the covers, but he sells it well (Narrator's voice: "It isn't shit...")

Marco is an excellent indie developer because he selects markets he has a good understanding of, finds his niche, then simply outclasses his competition by being ahead on features. He also has a loyal following from his podcasts, and is an aspirational figure for a lot of devs hoping to make money (or break free of corp serfdom).

A well written program/app isn't a necessary requirement for success.

Let’s take the opposite argument. Is an app “well written” if it doesn’t meet anyone’s needs?

As I'm sure you know, it "depends."

Well-written apps can meet a need, but it's like furniture. You can buy some cheap futon that gives you something to sleep on, but doesn't last long. Or you can buy a bespoke bed with handcrafted mortise and tenon joints, perfectly straight grained wood, and French polish finish. Both will give you a place to sleep, but one might last longer.

It's like my code. I have some super ugly python utils I've written that a "real" programmer would cringe when looking at the code. But it works 100% of the time when run (assuming the processes they call don't change their specs). The code is written for Python2, and breaks on Python3. It's not very clear how things work, despite extensive commenting. By your definition, these utilities would be "well written." To me, they're brittle, fragile eggs that I eventually will have to rewrite when Enterprise Security decides we can't have python2 binaries on our servers.

Fair point. No one else could probably maintain it but you.

Marco has already solved that problem. He said if he dies, his app dies with him…

Yes. This.

There are some segments from a few episodes that show that Marco is demonstrably not a super great programmer. I suspect some of his server side code is horrible. But he doesn't matter because he is super strong at other stuff super focussed on solving his own problems at gets it done. You don't need to be super great at programming you just need to be tenacious.

What’s the purpose of programming if it’s not “make the computer do stuff I need it to do to solve my problem”?

Yes I know all about clean code, automated testing, and “sound engineering practices”. But I’ve met a number of theoretical good coders who couldn’t ship a product that met the customer’s needs to save their lives. If I’m working to support my addiction to food and shelter, if I write code that doesn’t further that effort, I’m not being a “good programmer”.

Why do you insist on not understanding what it means to write high quality code? In some contexts, like my previous job, it's important. In others, like if you're making games or non-essential apps in your one man indie shop, much less so. Other qualities are much more important. But it doesn't matter if it's "important" or not, it's a concept that exists, and the only thing we are trying to discuss is that.

It's like if we were discussing the IQ of tech founders and you kept interrupting, saying "IQ is not all that matters", "You can't pay your bills with IQ points", "Steve Jobs might not have a genius IQ but he was a great entrepreneur and that is more important". It's all true, but irrelevant, since it's specifically IQ levels we are discussing.

My thesis is still code is meant to make the computer stuff. That “stuff” can be “Candy Crush” or “reliable code that doesn’t cause a plane to fall out of the sky”.

But writing the best “Enterprise FizzBuzz” that doesn’t solve a problem no matter how good the code is is meaningless. A great developer that writes code that no one uses is not a great developer.

In other words a great developer that can’t ship is worthless - the whole “smart and gets things done” metric.

You can think whatever you want, but we are still discussing the quality of the code that they write. Not which skill is more important, what life is like at Google, your inferiority complex about not passing the whiteboard test, or anything else.

FWIW, there are plenty of people who shipping great quality code everyday at Apple, Google etc. Not "FizzBuzz", but concise, human readable, robust, maintainable code. My only contention is that Marco probably wouldn't be able to write code to the standard required at some FAANGs. Casey definitely wouldn't. John quite likely. What do you think?

Keep in mind we are only discussing the code aspect. Not putting up with standups, corporate jargon, middle managers, 9-5 etc.

I also find it bizarre and think similarly... if you're going to cover up the person's face, why post it at all?

I have seen some people use these on dating apps where they don't want their own children's or other people's children's faces to be visible. I understand that use case a bit more from a privacy perspective.

It makes total sense. I don't have kids, but I certainly understand that they aren't old enough to understand the principle of consent when it comes to being photographed for pics that will be shared online by their parents.

So blurring them out somehow protects privacy and lets parents their habitual social media posting.

I think it's not just US thing, I've seen parents did the same thing outside US. There's a market for this but urgency is probably low, fortunately this got viral

There is another reason that he mentioned. If podcasting doesn’t work out, he can show that he still has up to date iOS development skills.

Ok, but he also mentioned it took him 6 months to make it, so those skills might not be quite up to date...

Personal attacks are a bad look.

This sort of nitpicky comment is exactly why people stress about putting stuff on the Internet.

It's not an attack, it's just a statement. If one purpose is to appear employable, he should not mention that it took him 6 months to write it because that is just too long.

It's one thing to "write an app" and something else completely to bring it to a standard consumable by lay users.

Having published and maintained an app that is in active use by even a couple hundred users gives you an advantage in employability and quite a big one at that.

Your post makes it seem like you have neither published an app yourself nor hired single devs who have, and it's easy to not appreciate.

I've been a professional iOS developer for a decade. 6 months is way too long for that app. My very first app took 10 weeks, including learning to program, and it was more complex than MaskerAid. And better looking, was even featured in the app store in a few countries.

Well then - congratulations! You are an outlier.

From my experience significantly less than 5% of iOS/Android devs have created a somewhat popular app, and maintained it for some time.

Oh, it wasn't popular, only got a few thousand downloads, I was hired by a social media app right when I finished my own app so I never had time to market it. Not that I would know how to do that. It was just an experiment.

I just took a look at your website, and your profile there, such as it is, it says you “built product at Apple”. Not sure what that means, though it implies you worked at apple, meanwhile your LinkedIn profile only lists your finance and environmental industry positions, so not really sure what to make of that. Regardless you appear to be a 0.01%er congrats, but no need to talk down to others.

Unless you want to hire me or invest, you don't need to make anything of that. Just trust me, 6 months is way too long. Or listen to the cohosts' reaction when he mentions it.

Not talking down, just telling it like it is. There is no rule on HN that you may only post laudatory comments. That would make the whole site useless. My point is that if he wants to be employable, he either needs to become more efficient, or at least hide how slow he is.

I'm sure he's raking in cash from the podcast so he shouldn't really worry about it at all in my opinion.

It was a passion project. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting to make even as much money as he makes from being a cohost on a podcast that charges $5500/ad read * 3 ad reads.

I wouldn’t be in a hurry to get it done either.

That's not the impression I got. To me it sounded like he was hoping to earn money from it. He said the same thing about his youtube channel, which also seemed very unlikely.

He’s been friends with most of the most successful indie developers in the iOS world - his cohost Marco - do you really think that Marco didn’t help set realistic expectations?

Well clearly he didn't, or at least it didn't help. Did you hear Casey talk about the app? Very unrealistic. Plus Marco didn't even test the app before it was launched, so I don't think he's been very involved. To be honest their friendship looks very asymmetric.

Now let’s say you were already making over a quarter million a year doing one podcast for 3 hours a week. How much effort would you put into an app?

Zero, that's my point. It's a waste of time.

So you have never done passion projects just to keep your skills up and stay familiar with an ecosystem?

No, not really. I've done passion projects for things I have a passion for, but not for keeping my skills up.

Well many people do. Like Casey, I did a pivot from pure software development to a job that pays much more given my skillset and interest. But is much more of a niche.

I keep an active open source profile just so I can pivot back to pure software development if needed. Casey likely makes more as a podcast host than he would make in corp dev as a mobile developer. Before that he was a .Net developer.

It's something to talk about on a podcast, so it is not a waste of time. Also, for many of us programmers, we really need programming in our lives otherwise we get that itch.

Your comments have been terribly absolutist about your own opinions. Please accept that other people have different priorities than you. Accept that other people have different comfort levels regarding their children's privacy than you. There's nothing wrong with your priorities, but there's also nothing wrong with people whose priorities are different.

I'm not saying people don't hide their children's faces, I know they do, saw it first in Japan more than a decade ago.

Im also not saying anything against his priorities, I don't care how he spends his time.

What I am saying is I don't think this app will make money, so if that is his main motivation, then it's a waste of time.

It isn’t his full time job. He was doing it as a side project

He’s on a 3 person podcast that could very well gross over $850K a year - 3 ad reads * 5500 * 52 weeks a year [1]. I wouldn’t make doing an app a high priority either.

He’s also on other podcasts.

[1] https://atp.fm/sponsor

Yeah I wouldn't spend a second thinking of that if I were on a high profile podcast like that. Much better to focus on growing that brand.

Mind you, given that Liss is on a bunch of Apple-focused podcasts, writing and publishing and marketing an iOS app really is giving him useful brand-related experiences. Being able to pull out recent personal anecdotes is very handy, even if he doesn't make any notable money directly from it.

Sure, in theory that makes sense. But he hasn't mentioned it once before last week, and he usually talks very little about his apps, so I don't think that is the main, or even an important reason. He also hasn't mentioned that as a reason.

He’s been talking about his apps for a decade. I first heard about FastText from an episode of Marco’s first podcast.

He talked about his other app too.

Siracusa even talks about his little Mac App Store apps that he admits may have made $30.

Marco is the only one who considers his app development as a real income stream.

When someone says they spent N months on something, that's not total clock time they spent in the code editor. It means they built it over the course of N months. You actually have no idea how long it took them.

Yeah, unless Liss explicitly said he was working full-time on it, I'd very much assume this is a "the thing I was fiddling with around my other responsibilities" project.

From reading your comments it seems like you're hoping or at least expecting this app to fail, not because it's bad, but because of what you think about the personality of the creator. It's weird and seems pretty toxic. You don't like the app, say what's bad about the app, don't shit all over the creator.

The app is not bad. If I had this need I would have used it. Well if Instagram hadn’t had it built in.

Many apps with worse UX and UI have been roaring successes, that is not the issue. I’m just saying that I think it’s very unlikely he will make any money from it, for reasons I’ve outlined before.

If malice was my motive, then I would egg him on, encourage him to spend lots of time doing something that doesn’t appear to be a strength.

Not long after that, they talk about how the first version of the app that had all the functionality was done much earlier, and the rest of the time was due to him doing pass after pass improving the UX (and time off for the holidays). That's incredible dedication and I honestly think it reflects well on him.

Have you tried the app? The UX is not that good, you can't resize and move the emojis at the same time, you have to choose one task at a time. Plus you need to put both fingers inside the rectangle it seems, there should be a very generous touch area outside the emoji itself.

Most corporation don’t hire iOS developers because of their great UX skills. They have an entire department to worry about the look and feel of the app.

Heck Marco, his cohost, has been very successful first with Instapaper and then with Overcast. He will be the first to admit that his UI skills aren’t that great.

It’s not like Tumblr - he was the initial developer - was ever a thing of beauty.

It was a comment on the comment I replied to.

But:

1. UI is not UX 2. Marco doesn’t have a UX department

Not sure what your point is about Marco to be honest.

That software engineers are not usually judged by their ability to do good UX and UI.

I replied to this:

> the rest of the time was due to him doing pass after pass improving the UX

From what he's said, MaskerAid is completely written in Swift/SwiftUI so perhaps his goal is to bring his skills up to date?

You also have to consider the modal, a one time 99 cent purchase. As much as a despise all those apps with subscriptions, it's the only way for an app like this to bring in the dough.

That is not so say what the developer here did was wrong, I commend him for having the integrity to not reach for a "99cents/month" subscription, but that is unfortunately where all the money is unless you have a high volume app.

Personally, I've been waiting for an app like this for a long time.

I don't use social media, but I have a group chat with a handful of close friends. Sometimes, I like to insert emojis into a photo for comedic effect.

Now I can do this without fighting with iOS's horrible Markup editor.

(Quite frankly, I'm surprised that this isn't part of iOS already.)

But it’s relatively easy to use iOS’s markup editor. The whole time he was explaining this app all I could think was… it’s so much easier to just use the markup editor.

If you’re sharing to WhatsApp… just use their editor, it allows adding stickers and emojis natively, it doesn’t auto detect faces… but is that strictly necessary?

For double points, if you don’t wanna share on WhatsApp you can still use their editor and just send it to yourself. Now you are still only using one app, and the new photo is saved automatically to your camera roll.

I kind of hate-listen to ATP at this point, as the only one who lives in the real world is Siracusa…

…but this is actually not easy to do via the iOS markup editor. It defaults to a pencil tool that draws way too fine of a line to mask a face without a loooot of scribbling, and adding a shape is a lot of taps. And text, forget about it, that's a pain in the default iOS editor. (Instagram: way better at this.)

This is a weird niche of a tool—it's for people who are posting photos to the Instagram timeline where you can't use the built-in stickers feature, or sending a lot of photos via Messages. But for this tiny niche: sure, useful.

Siracusa is great to listen to since he can make very complex subjects seem simple. His writing with Ars was similar. I listen to his other podcast and wish there was a way to mute his co-host so I only heard John. Despite the rambling, incoherent interruptions from said co-host, I still listen to the podcast because the value in listening to Siracusa outweighs the pain from MM.

You've found Casey's next app right there...

Can you do it in the default photo editing app? Don't have any iOS devices handy to check out, but on my current phone, the standard Google Photos app has text markup - including emojis.

Just tested it out and I was easily able to put an emoji over a face and resize/rotate it with pinch/drag type motions. Anything like that in the default Apple app?

Granted, there is nothing like the automation features in OP's app, so at least that part is interesting.

Frustratingly, no.

If you insert a photo into Messages and hit Markup, the first view gives you a bunch of pen/pencil/brush options, with fixed sizes per brush. There's a plus button that allows you to insert shapes and text…but you can't pinch-zoom to scale the text. You then have to tap around again to set the font size and color.

It's a weird, neglected-feeling interface. They could borrow a lot from Instagram's story editor.

I just tested and you can do it in Photos.app (activate Markup in the top right).

That said, fully agreed the UI is very clunky compared to doing similar things in Instagram's editor.

What the author of the app can do however is creating an <x-Apple>OS photo markup plugin that provides the more usable mask ‘aid’ tools. A feature I haven’t seen utilised once since it’s inception.

Yeah, that's definitely what he should do. Very surprising he didn't do it already, this is the perfect use case for markup plugins.

I know lots of pseudonymous people on Twitter who have large enough followings that they don't want to share their face or real name, and I've seen them do this sort of thing

I think the issue is that adding stickers to images is second nature to anyone who uses Instagram.

This is a little strange to hear, since it's genuinely not possible (as far as I can tell) in the main part of the app. Stories, yes, but not in the feed.

It's as if people use these things in wildly divergent ways, I guess.

Good point, I forgot that’s only for stories.

The iOS markup editor isn’t nearly as friendly for slapping on emojis and resizing them with two fingers.

That said there seem to be various photo editing apps that do make it easier that OP app is competing with.

I did actually skim through other apps that've been linked in the thread, and I didn't see one that seemed like a direct competitor with the combination of emoji + automatic face detection. Granted, this could be me defining the market too narrowly, and many people might get by without one of these just fine.

(My own App Store searching turned up one called Face Blur which seemed to have emoji as an option... as a subscription, which seems like a non-starter.)

I recently saw a friend post photos like this on FB. She was visiting her sister and blocked the sister's kids' faces. She didn't block the faces of her own kids, who are much older. Made sense to me! I don't know how often I'd use the app, but I've just downloaded it. I'm sure my kids would have fun playing with it, regardless!

I said on Twitter that there is a very obvious revenue strategy here. Pivot from tots to thots. Thots need to post censored versions of their photos on Instagram as the top of their Only Fans funnel. It’s a business expense for them. Seed it to some influencers but ask them to leave on the watermarks and then wait for other cam girls to buy it because all their friends are using it.

Brilliant! Then he could also bring back the old name.

Guess you have no idea with what apps you can make money :) If you have a decent app and good pricing you can convert something between 1-5% of downloads to paying customers. With his audience and reach he can easily make real money. Probably not life changing, but still a few hundred bucks each month.

A few hundred bucks a month is for all intents and purposes "nothing". It's a rounding error in terms of the time he spent on it.

He said on a podcast that he spent "6 months" developing it. I very much doubt that was 6 months of full-time work, but even if that was only 10 hours a week, and even if the "cost" was let's say $100 (probably much more) an hour, that's around $25k or 7 straight years of $300 a month (that never goes down for 7 years, aka impossible) to recoup his investment. That's an absolute low end, I think you could easily argue the cost was 4x that, which means it would take 28 years of sales that never dip to break even. There's no possible way he could make anything besides less-than-nothing level money at $300 a month or anything close to that amount.

As he explained on his podcast, this project was designed to solve his own problem. The problem with apps designed to solve your own problem is that very often, your problem is not 1) shared by others willing to pay or 2) you don't solve the problem in the same way others want to solve a problem.

Just for reference, $25K spent in time and then being able to talk intelligently about modern iOS development on a podcast that generates $16K an episode seems like a good investment.

And “time isn’t money”. It wasn’t like the time he spent developing it would have been spent working on something else.

He spends maybe 1% of the time talking about his apps, that really isn’t the reason.

And time is definitely money, or rather, money is time. If you already have an income stream that is more than enough for your chosen lifestyle, spending lots of time on something that might give you a tiny bit extra seems like a bad choice. Why not spend time with his family, travel, take up a hobby, or at least write an app that is just for fun. Or one that has some sort of chance of making it really really big. Obviously up to him, but still, hard to understand.

Programming is a hobby for him. He’s also not traveling. He has two small non Covid vaccine eligible kids. Hardly any Indy app has a chance of making any money in todays App Store.

I'm not sure why a bunch of commenters are dismissing the idea of hiding faces by placing emoji over them. That's already a thing. I see it a lot on photos that are shared online. It's a good alternatives to having to carefully frame or crop an image to hide objects and faces you don't want others to see.

As a parent of a preschooler I can confirm this is definitely a thing. We have decided to do what we can to avoid our child’s life being subject to data mining or the creation of shadow profiles by whatever company (past or present) thinks it can profit from it. We always cover his face with an emoji. So do most of the parents in our social circle.

To turn it round, do you spend time looking at other people's emoji-obscured photos?

I don't, so I can't see the point of posting them because I don't imagine that anyone would look at them. But I could well be wrong.

Given that it’s mostly used on Instagram: sure! It’s a picture-first medium after all. Obviously portraits are rare, but it’s quite common to see posts of their kids doing something adorable with just the tiny portion of the picture that contains a face covered. Plenty remains to see.

App has already 317 ratings on the App Store. Crazy what the power of hosting a popular tech podcast can do for you.

Nice implementation! We made a similar app a couple of years ago as part of a hackathon project but we never really polished it to submit to an app store

Description: https://devpost.com/software/patronus-k61iv4

Code: https://github.com/parasmehta/patronus

Unlike this app, we also used age and emotion detection on top of face recognition.

Hey, mine detects and redacts faces too (++text and ++macOS) https://gorp.app

How do you feel about the fact that yours has been out for a couple years, does essentially the same thing (although maybe has less appealing marketing images on the App Store TBH), and only has a handful of ratings compared to the 300+ for this new app from this popular podcaster? I ask sincerely, and I wonder if it speaks to the power of marketing.

I think it does speak to the power of marketing but that can mean a lot. I’m also not out here trying to get ratings, I’m making things I use and publish them because I think others will too. That’s why it’s free and ad free (and admittedly slow to update).

Also reviews can be paid for…

FYI Markup, a feature of the Photos app in iOS can essentially do this fairly trivially.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT206885

True, but it's honestly pretty fiddly. If you want to do exactly-this, adding an emoji is a pain because you have to jump through a few hoops to resize it -- pinch-dragging doesn't work.

This is such an obvious thing now that I see it. Great idea and execution. One might argue this should be a feature available natively, and a valid use-case for face-detection other than identification and tagging.

Is the app simple? Yes. Do you have to purchase it? No. Not sure why this turned into a critique of the programmer and subsequently his podcast and co-hosts.... weird.

I wish the makers of live video apps would add an AI feature to auto blur unknown faces, car plates and mask unknown voices.

This would make it possible to legally live stream in countries with strict privacy laws like Switzerland or Germany.

Can you please give some examples of live video apps you are referring to?

Instagram, TikTok etc.

I bet Apple or Android will probably include adding emojis the same in their photo/crop edit tools in a year or two.

People are already doing this with other apps as you see in dating apps and stuff.

Added a picture with a bunch of people. Not all of them got an emoji, so as I continued to add emojis, I wanted to pinch to zoom but that behaviour turned out to be for the emoji. Handling a tiny emoji was really add, so I’d appreciate be able to zoom in and out of the picture when I have to add more emojis :)

As seen on the "Accidental Tech Podcast" atp.fm

> There’s several reasons you may want to hide a face:

> [...]

> * The faces of protestors who are standing up against a grotesque war

I don't know if I find this disgustingly opportunistic or a solid gesture of protest and support.

Maybe both

Creator clearly wants the app for their own use case, but correctly identified another. It is neither.

"Neither" is an option. The marketing copy indicates something else.

But that'd be the best option yes.

In addition to emojis, imagine if this had deep fake support. For the war protestor use-case imagine if everyone in the crowd having the face of Zelenskyy.

It'd be nice if this was usually built into whatever social media app people use but I wouldn't trust most social media companies to not store the original image.

A sea of mini Nickolas Cage faces in pictures of your child at a playground would entertain some people.

Zelensky holding up signs for peace/ceasefire wouldn't be surprising.

We need pics of thousands in the streets with Sergei Lavrov's face. Or better yet, the warmonger in chief himself.

Virtue signaling at it's best.

(In this case, there is true virtue - but profoundly unlikely to be safely applied in the use case that exists)

The privacy of others was the original use I came up with when I made this same app for my final project in Intro to iOS class in grad school way back in 2017. From my initial project proposal

>Governments and tech companies such as Facebook are now continuously scanning all photos uploaded to the internet for faces, locations, and objects, effectively removing anonymity for anybody that is in any picture. A user might want to share a picture from a protest, but other users in the background might not want it known they were there.

>I would like to make a privacy focused camera application. The application will allow the user to take a picture and then it will find the faces in the picture. The user then will have to tap on the individuals in the photo they would like to be included in the final picture. By default all the faces in the picture will be marked as discard. After the user has finished selecting the faces the final picture will be produced. The faces not selected will have an effect applied to them to obscure that person identity. The user will then have the ability to share the photo to other applications, such as Twitter.

There is a lot of code in the standard library that includes face detection, didn't even have to add any libraries and was able to do the project in the last 2 weeks of class. I ended up putting a heavy mosaic over the faces, but emojis would have been just as easy. Still preferred Android dev over iOS after it, but was impressed with the included camera features.

To me the use case seems weird that she is trying to hide her kids so she can constantly post them on Instagram, when she has full control over taking pictures of her kids and what she puts on her page.

I love it. I'd love to also see something like this that can hide or change number plates of cars before posting online.

Why? I’ve never understood this practice. The number plate is already out in public nearly 24/7 anyway, what difference does it make if it’s unobscured in a photograph, unless it’s a stolen car or plate or something?

In countries like Switzerland where we have strict privacy laws you can not just post pictures online of cars plates that may expose someone's privacy.

For example a parking lot at a cancer hospital. The owner of a car can be identified by plate and therefore you need to make sure you don't expose them possibly having cancer etc.

It’s not too difficult to use that information to find out where the car probably parks at night. The difference being the odds of a random finding the car plate useful vs online an abuser, criminal is higher.

Another similar app that also works with video: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/anonymous-camera/id1504102584

Where I struggle with this is on the basis of the idea. At this point why not turn everyone into a Holo Live character or some other metaverse style creation? Our face is part of who we are and removing that feels very unnatural to me.

I think the point is in fact to obscure the subjects' identity.

the app is simple and clever... tho, you should NOT post personnal stuff on social platforms, do NOT post pictures of your kids ... the internet has become a dreamland for pedos and psychos

I agree, but only a small % of parents are going to refrain from the temptation to share pics widely, and that means online. So this app has a very beneficial use case.

So you're saying pedos are going to be jerking off to the image of two kids standing with their mother, possibly on their first day of school?

It seems like a significant investment to spend six months developing an iOS app solo, knowing it will likely be cloned and copied within a month.

First mover advantage, but it'll only take off if you work really hard in the first month or so to get the word out and become a 'household name'.

That said, yeah it's likely there will be competitors springing up left and right if it becomes popular (recent example is this "unpacking" game, the app store was flooded with clones within a month). For apps like this, your best hope is probably that a bigger party like Instagram knocks on your door and offers to buy you out to integrate the feature into their own apps. It's cynical, but this is where we find ourselves; I don't believe single feature apps have much of a future.

A photo manipulation app (generally speaking) is great, but unless you add a social network to it like Instagram did it's not going to go far.

“Investment in what?” It just took some time working on a hobby and “sharpening the ax”. I waste more time watching Netflix.

If he had wanted to make serious money as an app developer, he wouldn’t have quit his day job.

I don't get the use case at all. Just stop sharing images of people. We are living in backward times indeed. What is next? The social app that makes you anonymous?

Have you heard of 4chan?

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