Beware of the 13-year-old App Developer

A combination of young talent and entrepreneurship took the stage for the App World panel, moderated by Hubert Burda Media’s own Patrick Wölke. 

With the panel made up from Summly’s Nick D’Aloisio, Amen’s Felix Petersen, Mobile Roadie’s Michael Schneider and Khoya’s Shilo Siv Suleman, there was potential for app-enlightenment, and the audience indeed got what they came for.

“Building an app from scratch is re-inventing the wheel,” Mobile Roadie creator Michael Schneider began, setting the tone for debate about tomorrow’s mobile app landscape. 

He was soon joined by someone who seems to understand this message, prodigy Nick D’Aloisio, the creator of the buzz-worthy Summly app. Summly is a summarizing app that works by combining human linguistic power and algorithms to deliver the ultimate summary of site search. 

16-year-old A’loisio has been developing apps since he was 13, and sees his invention as needed add-on to today’s search engine power.

“We are a layer on top, we are complementary to search engines” the young entrepreneur said. 

Next up was Felix Petersen of Amen, an app that allows its users to create statements and rate them as the best and worst of nearly any given place, topic or person. 

“Amen is about having strong opinions,” Petersen said. “When you add different layers of opinion, you can create incredible complex pictures.” Anyone who has used Amen will know that this is very much true.

As a next step, Amen will also be adding pictures soon, Petersen added. 

Finally, Shilo Siv Suleman, the developer of the Khoya app, chimed in to share her alternative and intuitive version of tomorrow’s app development. 

“We need to remember to wonder”, Suleman said, as she explained the background of her app, which prompts children to interact with both the iPad and the surrounding nature. 

Suleman’s app, innovative, intuitive and progressive, in this way represents a brand new future for the industry. 

“The bar for user experiences in apps gets higher and higher”, Schneider noted, before D’Aloisio wrapped the panel up with a few wise words and single warning.

“Visuals are increasingly important for any app. Even the app icon makes a difference. It’s hard to get noticed.”

And developers will need to keep up with the trends, and know how to attract clients while never losing grip of the user experience. If not, someone else will take over. 

In the word’s of the panel’s youngest participant; “there are a lot of 13-year-old app developers out there.”