• Anima was founded by Roman Havrysh, the managing partner at Aimbulance (CEO), and Sergey Danilov, Ph.D. in Neuroscience. They have been working on the project for three years since the idea was born and a year since the start of active development.
• Previously, only psychologists and psychiatrists offline at a clinic could do a psychiatric assessment, but now, Anima can do it online. Moreover, according to Havrysh, the startup provides a more in-depth analysis thanks to eye-tracking technology, which is only now entering the market from scientific laboratories.
• As the founders told AIN.Capital, they invested more than $100,000 of their own money in Anima without any outside investment.

How it works

According to Anima, eye-tracking technology is an effective evidence-based remote diagnosis of mental states. The test is based on tracking eye movements with a camera and determining attention bias. All you need to take the neuropsychological test is a laptop with a camera, the Internet, and Google Chrome.

The test is only available on a computer in the Google Chrome browser. Webcams record eye movements to measure one’s focus in response to different stimuli. It helps to assess:

• a state of critical neurological systems
• how quickly they are ready to respond to danger
• emotional states of other people and potential rewards

Based on the user’s behavior, the instrument analyzes anxiety, depression, and the estimated risk of developing a mental condition.

“By analyzing eye movements, the way people notice and hold their attention on emotional, threatening stimuli, we can determine the level of anxiety or depression and how promising and safe people perceive the world around them,” Sergey Danilov explains.

Target audience and monetization

The startup focused primarily on the military since they are under considerable mental strain during the full-scale war. According to Anima, the startup collaborated with military hospitals and psychologists, including those at the front lines.

“Classic psychological tests only partially solve the problem of monitoring soldiers’ stress readiness. Anima solves the issue of determining combat readiness and allows timely detection of unwanted changes in a military’s mental state after and between battles for timely and rapid rehabilitation,” tells Viktor Komarenko, a military psychologist of Azov.

• Anima is available for free to military personnel. If you are a military psychologist or therapist working with displaced or vulnerable populations, you can get access at cooperation@anima.help.
• In response to the growing threat of population disorders and the need for financial stability, the startup has also launched a public version of the service. According to the World Health Organization, 1 in 4 Ukrainians has a significant risk of disorders.
• For civilians, the application has several tariff plans, starting from $10 for a test that allows you to diagnose your mental state. Money from monetization will be used for free testing for the military and further development of the product.
• Anima for civilians was released on February 6. As Roman Havrysh told the editor of AIN.Capital, the platform got several thousand visitors and hundreds of users in two days. As for the military version, the work there is more time-consuming and personalized, which also includes long-term therapy. Anima is not only a diagnostic tool but also a progress meter for several hundred patients.
• The team plans to make Anima a commercial project in the future, primarily in Western markets. They are currently working on a US launch.

Drill is available on the App Store and Google Play and is free for Ukrainians.

The program is designed for military personnel who need to continue training in any conditions and at any time and for civilian Ukrainians who would like to gain knowledge about the use of weapons and who lack the time or opportunity to visit gun clubs.

Ukrainian and international experts — military, athletes, and representatives of security organizations — were involved in the creation and testing of Drill. All exercises were developed on the basis of many years of experts’ experience who have participated in real combat operations and sport shooting competitions.

The app currently has two introductory courses with virtual handgun and carbine training (AR15/AK74):

• Basic Dry Carbine, a training course for gaining and developing entry-level carbine skills;
• Basic Dry Handgun, a course for users who want to have “dry” handgun practice as their primary one for the purpose of gaining and developing basic skills.

There are also 17 gun handling exercise programs of various complexity: from beginner level to self-defense in conditions of limited visibility. All of them are formed into seven lessons suitable for training professional military, athletes, and civilians.

App users can also create their own training plans, lessons, or courses to meet their personal goals. They can also track progress and receive feedback from certified instructors.

“This project was born out of a passion for shooting and tactical training but gained extreme relevance with the start of the war with the Russian Federation. Developing Drill, my team and I wanted to create a virtual personal trainer that would be convenient to work with regardless of location, time, and environment: training in the trenches, at a shooting range, or at home,” comments Aleksandr Gusarov, co-founder and CEO of the startup.

Drill will eventually expand the list of weapons available for virtual training, as well as add new programs and individual exercises. Moreover, Drill developers are already working on functionality involving computer vision and machine learning, which will allow shooters to track the progress of training and receive feedback in real time.

The startup’s goal for the next three years is to make Drill a multiplatform, one-stop tool that gives any gun owner access to a variety of specialized information.

Security

The company says its app is safe for users. However, Drill recommends reading the Golden Rules of Gun Handling before starting. Moreover, the user can’t start training or performing any exercise without reading the safety rules.

All the courses are divided into several complexity levels, from elementary to advanced. Before you go to the shooting range, you must first complete the basic courses, which do not require shooting. The user must repeat the exercise 20 times without a weapon, then 20 times with a weapon without ammunition, and then using live ammunition.

Monetization

Drill is free so far. With the entry into Western markets, the team plans to launch monetization. One of the most likely options is a monthly subscription. Sponsorship is also under consideration. For Ukrainians, they promise to keep the service free for as long as possible.

Especially, considering Lensa’s close ties with Russia. Although, the app uses Western technologies, in particular the Stable Diffusion neural network, it is actually a completely Russian project with Russian founders, investors, and developers. AIN.Capital tells about who are hiding behind Lensa project and why you should think twice before using it.

Created by a company from Russia

Lensa was created by Russian developers from the company Prisma Labs and released earlier this year. It offers the functions of a standard photo editor. However, on November 21, an updated version was released with a paid function Magic Avatars. It allows users to employ neural networks to make people in photos look like characters from anime, movies, real stars, and superheroes.

The service was created by Russians. As reported by the Russian Forbes, a student of the Moscow Institute of International Technology, Ilya Frolov, had the idea of the app. He shared it with Alexey Moiseyenkov at the end of 2015, when he was giving a lecture at the institute. A year later, in 2016, Russians Alexey Moiseyenkov, Andrey Usoltsev, Ilya Frolov, Oleg Poyaganov, and Aram Hardy founded Prisma.

Investors are Russians, including Yandex

• Almost immediately after its creation, in April 2016, during the seed round, the project was supported by Russian Haxus (Palta), Elysium Venture Capital, Mail.ru Group, and Gagarin Capital Partners.
• In the summer of 2018, the co-founders of Prisma Alexey Moiseyenkov and Aram Hardy left the company without explaining the reasons. At the beginning of 2019, Mail.ru Group and Moiseyenkov left the company’s shareholders, selling their shares to the investment company Haxus (Palta). It is currently owned by Russian Alexey Gubarev and Belarusian Yuri Gursky, who live in Cyprus.
• Haxus became (and still is) Prisma Labs’ largest shareholder with a stake of more than 40%. Moiseyenkov confirmed to Forbes the fact of shareholders’ withdrawal from Prisma Labs, while the representative of Mail.ru Group refused to comment.

Why is it important?

Even free apps that were created by Russians should not be used to prevent them from making money from advertising and promoting their projects. In addition, it’s better to mind the work of the Russian special services. No one can guarantee you a sufficient level of security when using programs written by your enemy.

However, Lensa does offer paid features, thanks to which it becomes more and more popular. Paying money to Russians provides direct financial support for the war, because Russian companies pay salaries and taxes in their country.

AIN.Capital publishes the list of those tools with the pricing details and Joe’s advices on how to use them.

1. Dorik.com for landing pages

• Easy to use sleek inbuilt templates for landing pages
• Lets you set up a landing page in less than 60 mins
• Easy with customization of branding and editing of the marketing copy
• Starts at $4/month (Has a free plan)

2. Airtable for data storage

• Easy to keep track of ongoing sprints
• A spreadsheet with good UX/UI
• Record all your users data / crm
• Easily collect data using simple forms
• Starts at $10/month (Has a free plan)

3. Zapier for workflow automation

• Automate recurring manual tasks like data entry
• Send automated emails, set up calendar events etc.
• Starts at $0 for 100 automation tasks per month

4. Outseta for signup and login

• Manage SAAS memberships
• Differentiate website/app pages for paid & unpaid users
• Starts at $39/month

5. Utilize app for Web Apps

• Builds simple, mobile-friendly apps on spreadsheets
• Easy to manage things like expanses, tasks, etc with personalized dedicated apps
• Starts at $50/month (Has a free plan)

6. Instacap.co for rapid collaboration

• Capture and share designs quickly
• Screenshot anything I want for inspiration
• Get comments, annotations, instantly
• All features free

7. Cal.com for scheduling

• Let the customer book demo sessions according to your availability
• Starts at $0 and pretty useful in the basic version

8. Figma for designing

• Collaborate with the team for social posts designs and app design
• Has a free plan that’s enough for the use case

9. Hotjar for user behavior analytics

• Gives clear and visual data points on your app and website
• Aggregates all the scrolls, clicks, and movements to give you a heatmap of how visitors navigate throughout
• Starts as $0 for about 1,000 sessions per month

10. Ahrefs for SEO

• Measure your competitors’ traffic
• Study what people are searching for on Google
• Estimate the ranking difficulty of related keywords
• Starts at $83 per month

11. Getemail.io for email capture

• “Legally” captures emails of all your anonymous website visitors without them knowing.
• Starts at $0/month

• The representatives of Obimy noted that they managed to get to first place in the rankings after the update that was released at the end of July 2022.
• The team has redesigned the design system from the ground up, and “sharing senses” has become easier: from opening the app to “touching,” users need to make just two clicks.
• They also added more animations, actions, and the ability to create their own meanings and describe the feelings.
• The US audience liked it, and, just one week later, the Ukrainian app Obimy became No. 1 in the Lifestyle category, surpassing Tinder, Pinterest, and Netflix, the team says.

“If people used to send an average of two actions per ‘session,’ in August, it was five. And that figure is growing. Every day our users send about four million senses,” commented Obimy.

As of August 5, 2022, Obimy has 6.5 million downloads and an average DAU of 500,000.

About Obimy

• Obimy is a Ukrainian app that was launched in 2020 by architect Zhenya Zasutskyi and IT company Empat.
• Before February 24, 2022, obimy had roughly 20,000 active users. During the five months of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the app’s audience skyrocketed to more than five million. Read more detailed story about this impressive result here:

In this first-person article, the CEO of obimy, Zhenya Zasutskyi, shares the story behind this impressive result.

Reasons for Rapid Growth

Before February 24, we had roughly 20 thousand users. Back then, we thought it was a lot. For half a year before that, we had been testing various audiences and marketing channels, including TikTok. We were looking for growth methods, aiming to go viral without a huge marketing budget. With the beginning of the invasion, the number of the app’s users started to grow swiftly, starting with the Ukrainian audience. At first, we had 4,000 new downloads per day; then 10, 20, and 50 thousand. Now, obimy’s DAU is from 400,000 to 500,000 users, and its MAU is three million.

As it turned out, we were completely wrong about who obimy was for. Judging by the analytics, the main driving force behind the growth was TikTok users aging from 14 to 20. Also, not only our own promo videos have gone viral: many people have posted screen recordings telling how the app worked. That’s how we’ve got our own micro-influencers.

After we started growing in the US, the trend moved to the UK, and there, our app was No. 1 in the App Store top list for several weeks. The same happened in the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Australia. In total, we were the No. 1 top app in 45 countries. It was very surprising and pleasant to see obimy conquering the whole world, with 50,000 to 100,000 people from over 100 countries downloading it a day.

For that, I must give huge credit to Anastasia Avramenko, our Head of Marketing. Back then, she was doing analytics, shooting videos for TikTok, making graphics, and chatting with our users simultaneously. It was tough, but the result was worth it.

During the next two months, we reached five million downloads in 175 countries, entering the social media mainstream for young audiences.

The Problems We Faced

We faced several typical young startup problems. The app’s backend was not quite ready for such growth: during the first week of our rise to fame, the servers were crashing every three to four hours, 24/7. When we reached the top of AppStore or Google Play in a country, our servers could barely handle it.

Kostia and Vova, our developers, were working non-stop, rewriting the backend and bringing the app back online. Dmytro, responsible for customer support, had to deal with 200 reviews every day. Slava, our product owner, turned into our project manager, while I had to combine my CEO responsibilities with customer support.

During March and April, we had no fixed working hours at all. But somehow, we managed to fit into that routine naturally. I didn’t have to convince my team to do their job. Everybody was in position, aware of their responsibilities and the significance of what was happening. Everybody was doing their best and even better than that.

The App

At first, we positioned obimy as an app where you can share your biometrics – your heartbeat, the number of steps you’ve made today – and get emotional feedback. Eventually, the app turned into what we call a sensenger: a service that helps people communicate with feelings and emotions from a distance. After we had shifted our positioning to ‘being the world’s first Sensenger,’ people realized what we’ve created. At the same time, we’ve got a deeper understanding of our own product.

Curiously, the most popular function is ‘to hug.’ In two months, our users exchanged more than 130 million feelings or, as we call them, ‘senses.’

The app has popularized itself. We just created a good product and looked for ‘growth hacking’ promotion methods. It sounds unbelievable, but we reached 1 million in downloads, having spent only $500 on marketing.

The app’s new version has shifted to a mixed model, including both subscription and in-app purchases. The subscription includes many new senses and possibilities. Premium users can now create their own senses, but we’ve also quadrupled the number of free senses. Also, the avatars are now customizable. Users can change their color and add accessories. Every day we sell 500 colors and several thousand actions.

obimy: Countries and Users

As of July 2022, obimy is being used in 175 countries, each one ranging from a thousand to 300-500 thousand users. Now we’re focused on the US, the UK, and Saudi Arabia. We’re also localizing the app for Japan, Brazil, and Spain.

All in all, our audience has become ten years younger. Honestly, it makes us extremely happy. It feels like we’re defining the future. Curiously, obimy has a global reach. We have virtually identical app growth in Asia, the Middle East, the UK, North America, and Europe.

The Team and the Plans

Our core team is 12 people. Each one is 100% focused on the app’s success. I’m proud of the things we’ve achieved together, and there’s much more to achieve in the future. We also have 20 part-time and outsource team members: lawyers, accountants, PR specialists, motion designers, etc. At least 30 people are working on obimy each month.

We’re now shifting from part-time or outsource workers to full-time employees for some positions. But we have a less-is-more mindset, so we’re not going to hire people just for the sake of it. As we’re a startup, the team’s efficiency must be a bit more than 100%. That’s the only way to achieve success. Every open position means 50 to 100 CVs and 15 to 20 interviews; the whole team selects the new candidate.

Our goal is to get a share of the social messaging market. I believe we can reach more than 100 million users. We also have an even larger mission: to enable people to feel each other wherever they are as if they were together. That’s what we’re working on now.

• Alty Inc., jointly with the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, has launched a mobile application for tracking casualties of the invaders, called Russian warship go fuck yourself (РКИН). The main screen displays the number of losses by individual categories, including losses of enemy personnel.
• According to the company, after the English-language localization of the application, Apple requested to remove the data on death tolls. First, the company asked to remove all data, but after negotiations with the developer and an appeal against this decision, they left the requirement for manpower losses:

“Apple called our app potentially objectionable content based on the company’s ethical policy. We had a long argument with Apple, gave all the supporting data from open sources, and told them about the cooperation with the AFU and their “blessing“ to create this application. But the company delivered an ultimatum: either we remove these statistics, or they remove the application from the store,” the company told AIN.Capital.

As Alty explains, the company has to accept these requirements to keep the app. But it has been receiving a lot of questions from users who are concerned about this decision.

“We understand the users very well, but we can’t do anything about it yet. We are still negotiating with Apple to get this data back. There are already a few ideas for them to consider, but whether they will accept them, unfortunately, it is difficult to say right now,” the company says.

• According to the startup, the United Kingdom is the leader in Europe by volume of investment, as well as the first country in the region where the number of IT companies with a capitalization of over $1 billion has reached a hundred. Accordingly, the local presence of Headway in the capital is an additional opportunity for raising funds and developing its business.
• Headway has an office in Warsaw and Lviv, which appeared due to the team’s evacuation. The Kyiv office has partially resumed its work. There is also an office in Nicosia and now in London. There are only 150 people in the Headway team.
• There are currently about 20 job openings at Headway. The company plans to add 40 more by the end of July. All the positions are fully remote, with the option to visit the office. You can check out all the job openings here.

• Headway is an IT company that creates EdTech products that help users develop their skills through concise formats of educational content: courses, videos, games, infographics, etc. The startup’s main product is the Headway app.
• The Headway app is an educational app that allows users to read a book in 15 minutes. It contains summaries and main ideas of 1000+ non-fiction books about business, motivation, and psychology. They are divided into categories and available in text and audio formats.
• Over 12 million users worldwide have downloaded this app. Apple regularly tops it on its stores in 140+ countries. Last year, Headway was No. 1 worldwide by number of downloads in its category.
• Since the start of a full-scale war in Ukraine, the company has not stopped hiring and has launched several social projects to support Ukraine. The team created a free collection of summaries about Russia’s crimes against Ukraine for the app audience from 140 countries with an appeal to support Ukraine’s Armed Forces and the humanitarian needs of Ukrainians. The company also developed a series of safety infographics based on official sources to help Ukrainians keep themselves and their loved ones safe during the war.

The application will work immediately in all 69 countries and will allow the user to find work among all job openings with more than 140 thousand resources. At the same time, the user can search simultaneously in several specialties and regions, as well as search for job offers for remote employment.

The application is currently in test mode. It allows you to set up notifications and receive daily updates with new career opportunities. Jooble Job Search helps you not only view job openings but also respond to them directly from the application. If the user wants to reply to ads through another device, the feature of sending job posts to messengers will help.

“We have created an application to enable the user to find a job even faster and more conveniently, receiving all offers from employers in one place. The service will be gradually supplemented with new features for comfortable use.”

Max Belyak, CPO of Jooble Aggregation

About Jooble

Jooble is one of the largest job search sites in the world and one of the top 10 most popular employment resources. Today, people use Jooble to find work in 69 countries worldwide. 

Jooble has publicly condemned Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, and the company has ceased operations in the labor markets of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus.

We have recently published a report on the Polish startup labor market and salaries of IT specialists in the startup sector in Q1 of 2022. The research is based on the data from 2,958 job offers published on Just Join IT, a Polish online service for finding IT-related jobs, from July 2021 to March 2022. Check it out!

At the same time, the service still displays the names of states and borders of regions.

“In the near future, the map will become more physical-geographical on scales where it is not used for its main purpose. The emphasis there will switch from country borders to natural objects. Our goal is to display the world around. Therefore, mountains, rivers, lines of the polar circles and other data which is specific to this type of map will appear on it,”

Yandex Maps press service says.

However, the users believe that the reason for the change is somewhat different.

Why it’s interesting

Yandex is a Russian company. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yandex’s search, news, and other services have been reporting Russian propaganda, hiding reliable sources of information. As a result, Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh was sanctioned by the EU, and immediately left the company.

Previously, some top managers also left Yandex. They expressed their disagreement with the company’s policy and opposed the war in Ukraine.

About Waterllama

• Waterllama is a drink water reminder and tracker that allows users to monitor their water balance. Log your liquid intake and fill in the llama character in the app.
• Users can also change characters, select drinks, run challenges, and set up reminders on their mobile devices and Apple Watch. Synchronization with Apple Health is available too.

• The app was developed by Ukrainian spouses Vitalii and Polina Mogylevets in 2019.
• Waterllama is available in 13 languages.
• You can download it from the Apple Store by clicking here.

“The rental search app Birb is launching in London, in one of the most difficult and competitive markets. Birb’s team is from Ukraine, and they continue to work and support the Ukrainian economy,” the company reports.

• According to the developers, while using many rental apps, it is quite challenging to find a location of an apartment, and maps in such apps are not always user-friendly.
• Birb’s developers focused on this issue and built an app based on a mobile map with the addition of artificial intelligence that removes duplicate listings, adjusts images, etc.
• According to the team, the app features ads from agencies (realtors) now. But in the future, the company plans to make it possible that the renter does not interact with intermediaries or owners at all. The app will work the following way: You watch online viewing in the app, tap Rent this flat, check-in with a digital key from the app.

Tools that help to collect the information

The chatbot e-Enemy partly looks like a mobile game. You have to tag the location of the enemies and get rewards in the form of emoji. e-Enemy has become an assistant on the battlefield. The Ukrainian army receives messages from the chatbot, and they help perform successful attacks on the positions of Russian soldiers. It was developed by Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, and it is just one of several tools created by the government to crowdsource and verify war crimes.

Since the invasion began, Ukrainian officials, lawyers, and human rights groups have tried to develop new ways to verify videos, photos, and eyewitness testimonies. Ukraine has adapted government applications to allow citizens to document damage to their homes or recognize people’s faces.

According to the experts, this experience by Ukrainians is unlike any in the history of modern warfare. Crowdsourcing of evidence of war crimes has been done in other conflicts, but “the use of open-source information as evidence in the case of Ukraine may be at altogether a different level,” says Nadia Volkova, director of the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group.

Apps, chatbots, and websites developed by Ukrainian officials classify different types of war crimes and human rights violations. They are then entered into a single centralized database created by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General. These crimes include killing or injuring civilians, physical violence or imprisonment, denial of medical care, looting, and property theft by the occupiers.

The website of the Prosecutor General’s Office has already received more than 10,000 pieces of evidence from citizens. What all this will yield is still unclear. International war crimes cases are difficult to investigate. However, Ukrainian officials say that the evidence of Russian atrocities goes far beyond the trial in The Hague.

Ukraine also see this evidence as a defense against Russian disinformation. For example, against Kremlin claims that the murders in Bucha or Mariupol are “fake” or staged.

How it works

A few weeks after the start of the full-scale invasion, a Russian military convoy passed near Kherson. As they crossed an intersection, employees of the Ministry of Digital Transformation in Kyiv watched as e-Enemy received dozens of photos and videos from residents’ windows. The government monitors the chatbot around the clock.

“Almost every apartment sent us a report. So we could geolocate them to almost every apartment on those two streets,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Minister of Digital Transformation, says.

More than 253,000 people have sent footage of movements and reports of the actions of Russian troops through the chatbot, according to the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Over 66,000 people have submitted evidence of damage to their homes and towns.

Many Ukrainian prosecutors now working on war crimes investigations had previously been trained in the using of open-source data. “So we have experience with this kind of evidence, and we’ve focused all the forces of our prosecutors on the war crimes claims. We need to operate really quickly to store all the evidence from the beginning if we want to use it in different courts,” said Serhiy Kropyva, a digital adviser to the Prosecutor General.

According to Kropyva, the government has promoted the site through television interviews, billboards, and Internet ads, encouraging Ukrainians to report any violations. The government’s war crimes dashboard lists about 6,500 photos, videos, and other documentation. The “crimes against children” section alone lists at least 191 children killed and 349 wounded. The site offers 18 detailed categories, including sexual violence, torture, death, and hostage-taking.

There is also a section called “Enemy’s personal data.” It allows users to provide any information about the Russian forces: documents, passports, call signs and pseudonyms, identification marks. As of April 14, 570 “suspects” were identified, including Russian military and political officials, ministers, and heads of law-enforcement agencies.

The need to record war crimes has led Fedorov and other officials to ask social media companies to review some of their rules, like removing content that might document eyewitness accounts of war crimes for breaking the rules.

“The community guidelines were made in peaceful countries to account for normal, everyday communication going on in peacetime. Some content which might not be permissible in peacetime could be instrumental to proving war crimes,” says Mykhailo Fedorov.

Ukrainian officials are trying to create a comprehensive body of digital evidence collected in a modern war. When asked if the minister believes in these efforts, Fedorov has no doubt. “We have satellite imagery, we have the verified content from our apps, we have other sources that I’m not at liberty to disclose…I am very sure it will help us prove our case in international jurisdictions.”

• bird is an experimental product by LUN, which appeared on the App Store in December 2018. Its main features include a detailed 3D map highlighting buildings with apartments for rent and an AI-based solution for tackling the problem of fake listings.
• The application works as an aggregator. It collects apartment listings from 24 real estate websites, such as DOM.RIA, Country.ua, OLX, Rieltor.ua, 100rielty.ua, etc.
• The operation principle of London’s birb, as well as the main features, are similar — the application collects listings from the two largest real estate platforms in London. Afterward, birb‘s artificial intelligence structures them, transfers them to a 3D map, and checks for duplicates.

To get stronger, you have to play with the best. That’s why we chose London as the second city to launch. London is the perfect city for this task. It has a well-developed rental market with intense competition. Also, other pleasant advantages include the English language and a high percentage of iPhone users. This is important because our app now works only on iOS,” said Arseniy Feshchenko, designer and head of the birb team.

There are two differences between these two applications. First, the name of the London app has been changed to birb. According to the company, it was created with the purpose of parallel development of two versions of the app — the international birb and Kyiv’s bird. The second difference is the map. It was completely redesigned for London, and filters adapted to British realities.

You can read more about the Kyiv application bird in our article.

About Towers: Relaxing Puzzle

Towers: Relaxing Puzzle is a casual game aimed at training users’ spatial thinking. Playing the game, users have to drop towers in free cells and reach their goal. The game has five modes and 6,500 levels, including 100 bonus ones. The game has a Ukrainian localization, as well as other JOX Development projects.

Although the studio came up with the idea for Towers: Relaxing Puzzle back in 2019, the launch took place only in 2021. According to JOX Development, the team spends a lot of time working on the details and implementation of high-quality graphics. The latter has minimalistic 3D elements that keep players’ eyes from getting tired. Three full-time developers of JOX Development worked on the game, as well as a sound engineer and a team of translators.

JOX Development says that the idea of the game is unique. This kind of gameplay had not been seen before the release of the Ukrainian Towers game.

“Many developers try to work with tried and tested mechanics. They only make clones of the basic original idea. Now there is a huge number of games. So it is not easy to come up with something new. The mechanics of Towers: Relaxing Puzzle are unique,” comments Denys Moisin, co-founder of the studio.

In 2021, the number of downloads of Towers: Relaxing Puzzle on Google Play exceeded 250,000. The figures on the App Store are also growing — 80,000 installations as of early December 2021.

About JOX Development

JOX Development is a Kyiv-based development studio launched in 2017 by Denys Moisin and Pavel Glagolev. As of 2021, the team consists of 4 full-time members and several subcontractors working remotely.

The studio’s first game was Tap Tap Dash, created in collaboration with Cheetah Mobile. According to the developers, this reaction training game became a success shortly after its release. By the time of this publication, it has been downloaded by over 100 million of Android and iOS users. The next JOX Development product, Orbia: Tap and Relax, became popular too. In 2018, the game was nominated for Google’s best casual games.

“Tap Tap Dash is unique as well. It has influenced the entire casual gaming industry (nowadays, many make their levels seamless in arcade games). Simultaneously, there were over 40 clones,” Denys Moisin recalls.

JOX Development is currently working on two projects. By 2022, the team has planned to release new games and increase staff for better efficiency.

“We are quite busy now. But considering our quality and detailing standards, the process is not that fast. We do a lot of revision, monitoring, testing. Possibly, new games will be released next year.”

Denys Moisin

• Headway is an educational app that helps you read a book in 15 minutes. It contains summaries and key ideas from 1,000+ non-fiction business, motivational, and psychology books.
• Since early November, Headway has been among the top 10 educational apps on the platform in the UK, India, Australia, Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands, Cambodia, Qatar, UAE, Indonesia, Ireland, and Singapore.
• Headway also remains the top downloaded app in its niche during 2021.
• The Education category is the third-largest category by the number of apps on the Apple Store after Games and Business. There are over 482,000 educational apps available on the store, and Apple displays no more than 200 apps in different countries on its top picks.

About Headway

Headway is an EdTech project that is part of the ecosystem of the international IT holding company Genesis. Its main product, an educational app, was created in March 2019 to help people across the world learn and develop on their own. In two years, it has been downloaded by over 7 million users from 140 countries.

OBRIO, one of Genesis’s businesses, works on four product directions: Mobile, Web, GameDev, SaaS. Currently, the astrology app Nebula is the largest project of the company and is also the most downloaded app in the US in the astrology niche. It is used by over 13 million people in 50 countries. Besides, it has become the app of the day in App Store in the US and Great Britain and even outpaced Tinder several times.

Launch of the Android version

Although Android is the most popular OS for smartphones, the companies involved with mobile apps development usually invest more effort into the iOS platform. It is quite logical since iOS users normally bring more profit as compared to Android users. However, after the iOS 14.5 release, it became vital to use all opportunities for conducting purchases with clear and timely metrics. 

My work in the OBRIO company and in marketing began in June 2020. I started with marketing for Nebula, the only existing product at that time, which was available only on iOS. Our marketing team comprised three media buyers, each of whom was responsible for their ads platform (one or several). My first experiences were related to Snapchat and TikTok.

These platforms brought us good results but were quite unstable. They are rather suitable for one-time scaling, when one has a top-performing ad creative, than for the correctly organized strategy and stable volumes.

Later on, new products appeared on the project. One of them was Nebula for the Android platform. Thus we had to change the working process of the marketing team. Since then, the focus of each marketer shifted from ad platforms to a particular product. We wanted to make the new products as steeply developing as Nebula iOS was. However, this was impossible without corresponding resources. Furthermore, we had noticed that our team often faced communication difficulties. For instance, some team members could not understand why did we make particular changes? Why did we conduct these tests, not others? This pushed us to create separate marketing mini teams inside OBRIO, those which had to be responsible for Nebula iOS, Nebula Android, and other apps.

It may seem that parting the app versions for different operating systems into a separate product was not logical. The thing is that the Android version was released much later than the version for iOS. When the iOS version was on the scaling stage, outpacing Tinder in the ratings, bitting new records each day, the Android version was only on the MVP stage, and we knew neither the audience nor the economy well. 

Our mini teams were quite small in size. Back then, we lacked a product manager for all apps and an analyst. A marketer was in response for choosing which ad platforms to invest time in to reach business aims. On the level of mini teams, we also identified problems of the products and brainstormed ideas to solve them.

Prioritization and ideas testing 

We estimated the pool of available ideas according to the ICE framework (crossed out). We TRIED to estimate the pool of available ideas according to the ICE framework. But we discovered that it was somewhat hard to objectively consider the ideas and their impact on the product (even based on the prepared grading scale).

One of the failed plans was to limit the most popular functionality. Nebula contains the section of zodiac compatibility in which the user can check up to 10 zodiac pairs in one session. Our idea formed naturally: what would happen if we restrict the number of checks per day and offer them as the premium functionality? Now it seems quite logical that motivation through restrictions is not the best idea, but now we also have the numbers with test results for complete confidence.

We have learned three lessons out of this case:

1. If you want to make the product successful — you should translate it into value, and do not force a user to believe that it is valuable.
2. When you generate an idea, you should choose the instruments that would help you distinctly estimate its impacts and necessary resources. You need the experience to make those instruments work right. 
3. Each genius idea has to be underpinned by the MVP functionality, according to which you can check the hypothesis. 

Nebula Android pipeline: the problems

To understand, which changes does the product need, one has to carefully analyze previous marketing results and product metrics. Analysis of the pipeline considerably helps in forming ideas and tasks prioritization. 

The Nebula Android pipelines had significant differences from the iOS-version on each stage: conversion from installing to trial was smaller by 1.5 times, conversion from trial to payment — by 2.4. These metrics hugely impacted the efficiency and volumes of purchases as the LTV trial (the effective cost per user who began the trial) was too low to scale volumes with positive ROMI (Return of Marketing Investments).

Additionally, we discovered that above 70% of users who began the trial did it immediately after onboarding. So it was vital to translate the value of the product from the first seconds of usage. 

Apart from the product metrics, the potential obstacle concerned our score in the Play Market. In April 2021, it was 2.9. The users complained that the Android version was not complete, that the subscription was too expensive, and the ads were too many. The score can either motivate a user to download an app or push them to find an alternative. In fact, it represents reputation. The 2.9 score is objectively not too attractive for a user. Especially I would not have trust or wish to try such a product.

We could have chosen to improve only the app content, add new sections, but decided to focus on two metrics instead — conversion from installing to trial and from trial to subscription. To boost these, we resolved to improve the first two stages — onboarding and user activation. And it gave remarkable results. 

What we did

1. Conversion from trial to subscription 

This was the first step we started working with. We held monetization tests, changed subscription opportunities, prices, and tested different variants of sales screens. But practically, the test groups showed worse results as compared to the actual variants. If there were some which worked better, their benefit still was minor. 

Ordering compatibility reports was one of the most popular services among our users at that time. The report was completed by astrologers based on parters’ data and gave detailed information about the relations of two people.  Our idea was to present our subscribers with the basic compatibility report for free. It was also completed by astrologers and provided accurate information (but did not take into account all personal data, was more generalized). The idea did not require major development resources but boosted the conversion from trial to subscription by more than 2 percentage points.   

2. Trial conversion

This number is formed by estimating an app onboarding: the experience of a user during their first usage of the product, its usefulness, and pleasantness. 

At that moment, Nebula Android had the standard onboarding process, which required basic information about the user: name, place, and date of birth. On one hand, the onboarding was simple and understandable. It needed a minimum of personal information, which meant it was secure for a user since we did not collect their detailed data. On the other hand, such onboarding could signify that we provided only basic knowledge which could be found on other resources.

We decided to conduct a test, by adding more questions to better understand the purposes for which users downloaded the app, and later introduce even more unique content and opportunities.

The onboarding consisted of extended questions about diverse life spheres and required more time to pass. However, the test results turned out positive, and the trial conversion was boosted by more than 1 percentage point. 

3. Rating compilation in the app

Besides conducting tests, we also worked over other app features and content. The Play Market score remained low, but we had the hypothesis that it would increase as we improve our product. Nonetheless, we decided to realize the rating pop-up in the app. Mostly, people are more willing to complain about the problems than to express their gratitude. So it was vital for us to receive more user responses to understand if our product was helpful or needed drastic changes. We did not expect that rating collection would change our Play Market score. But when the new version with the pop-ups was released, our score elevated from 2.9 to 4.6 in less than a day. 

All we needed to do was to ask active users about how much they liked our app. 

With such seemingly easy steps, we improved each stage of the pipeline starting with a click on an ad to the activation and users retain. 

Marketing 

Singular improvements, which we made, did not guarantee the growth of the audience. The situation changed drastically only when we applied all the product changes for 100% of users. In approximately a month, the volumes increased 4 times. 

Facebook is the primary source of traffic for Nebula Android. For quite some time, the platform did not provide the required results. The deterring factors besides Facebook itself also included our approach to marketing and the efficiency of ad campaigns. 

We had one question in mind: how can we boost the volumes from Facebook? Back then, almost all the campaigns were launched on “bid cap”, which meant that volumes were minimal. The expenses could reach ~5% of the daily budget during the whole life cycle of the campaign. Meanwhile, the purchases at the “lowest cost”, which could boost our traffic, were expensive, and campaigns burnt out in a few days. However, we had to learn to optimize these exact campaigns, which would help us scale in the long run. Here are several rules which we had defined during this period:

1. If you have any doubts regarding work with the lowest cost — you would better withdraw these campaigns into a separate account or revise the automated rules for the main one to reduce their impact on the lowest cost campaigns. Automatic Facebook rules for ads turning on/off can impact the optimization and restrict you from noticing the positive dynamics.
2. Start with small budgets. I cannot provide exact recommendations, but you should expect approximately ten target actions.
3. Try not to make decisions about campaign shut down during the first day and observe which conversion % you will receive in some time. Our model is subscriptions, and we are optimizing for trials, so at the beginning of working with these campaigns, I watched how the trials lasted in the first 2-3 days. If I see that for 2-3 days in small volumes, the price is approaching the target, I raise the budget. You should take into account that this time gap can be bigger for you since you do not optimize actions, which a user takes immediately (maybe you should better observe the campaign during ~7 days)
4. I do not follow the rule which advises “not to increase by more than 20%” when I see positive dynamics. I can double it to collect more data for a campaign. If your budgets are bigger, you better play safe.
5. Duplicate the companies from the beginning:

• your budget will be divided into smaller portions among several campaigns. If some of them do not optimize, you will lose much less as compared to the losses in the case of bigger investments into one large campaign.
• there is a serious possibility that the indicators by these campaigns would differ. Thus you can choose a “winner” and scale it.
• besides, one company with a small budget will hardly give you the possibility to scale volumes quickly.

Such an experiment has witnessed that campaigns can really be held even during a whole month. The market seasonality also had a positive role. However, we could not have increased the volume and preserved traffic payback without improving the product and rethinking the marketing strategy.

Conclusions 

Here I would like to share several conclusions:

1. Many effective ideas have already been realized — do not be too shy to use them. When one starts working over something new, they desire to generate a new genius idea, that would produce a breakthrough in their industry. This intention is very commendable. But always keep in mind that many working approaches have already been realized, and sometimes all you need is to use them properly. 
2. Numeric books and articles were written about soft skills for a clear reason — communication is vital. Any team sometimes faces problems: developers do not understand how does marketing work and why it is impossible to scale in a day; marketers do not understand why some crucial tasks cannot be realized immediately; analytics launch tests, and someone does not see their purpose. It is important to trace all the cases when someone from the team “did not know” or “did not understand” because this is the marker of miscommunication. In our case, the creation of mini teams helped us better understand the process and each other.
3. Concentration. It is impossible to become successful with a product in which someone devotes 10%, 20%, or even 50% of their time. Success equals 150% of the attention.

I hope you enjoyed reading about our experience in product scaling. By writing this article, I wanted to show that it is vital to cooperate as a team, be quick in making decisions, and be flexible in your work. I will be thankful for any comments and reviews!

Author: Katia Pietukhova, Marketing Specialist at OBRIO

A new version of the application will work a bit differently. AIN.UA describes how you should proceed now by crossing the border.

• All unvaccinated people who come to Ukraine need to install Vdoma for the next 72 hours until the application gets information about a negative PCR test or an antigen test. After that, you can delete the application. There is no need anymore to pass control via geolocation and face recognition as it used to be.
• The test must be done only in a lab certified by the Ministry of Health of Ukraine.
• If it is negative, the Vdoma app will get information about that. If it is positive, you will need to stay for the next 14 days at a place you set during the app installation.
• In case that someone crossed the border and did not make a test within the following 72 hours, the application will be deactivated and will notify the police. After getting a notification, the police officers can visit and check you at the address you set as your self-isolation place.
• The foreigners who do not have a vaccination certificate and refuse to install the Vdoma app would be banned from visiting Ukraine. Ukrainians must stay home for 14 days of observation in such a case.

To sign up for the Vdoma app, you have to provide the following information:

• first name, second name, patronymic (if any)
• passport series and number
• place of self-isolation
• phone number

About the Vdoma app

Vdoma (formerly called ‘Dii.Vdoma’) is a mobile application for monitoring self-isolation launched by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine on April 7, 2020. Initially, the app monitored self-isolation for people arriving in Ukraine by checking geolocation and taking selfies to confirm it. Also, it was possible to call for emergency medical assistance from the app.

On June 16, 2021, the Cabinet of Ministers canceled the mandatory self-isolation, and the Vdom app was disabled while Ukraine was in the green zone. Until October 2021, Ukrainian citizens and tourists could freely cross the border of Ukraine. During that time, “Vdoma” was updated, according to the Ministry of Digital Transformation.

AIN.UA will tell you about the app algorithm, its inventors, and their plans for the future.

Idea

The idea of creating Elizium belongs to its founder, Kyrylo Mykhailenko, who collected some negative experiences using other dating apps. Fiorry Social LTD and Ideal Society LLC developed a final product within less than four months. Their previous releases were KyivDate and Fiorry apps.

“Previous projects of our team got funding from private investors. But Elizium is the very first experiment our team and founder made for his funds. And Elizium appeared to be most popular among them,” said one of the app developers to AIN.UA.

Elizium is the first dating app developed by this team. It has specially designed a brand and a compatibility algorithm for the application. Currently, only 12 people are working on the project.

Elizium is trying to solve the crisis of online dating. It allows you to highlight persons who highly likely could build a successful relationship with you. So, you can find people more suitable for you according to their goals, sexual wishes, lifestyle, values, character, and habits.

How does Elizium work

You can download it both for iOS and Android.

• After setup and registration, Elizium will ask you to add a picture of yourself.
• Then it will ask you about the gender you are looking for and the age of a potential partner.
• After that, you may fulfill the profile needed to create your psychological portrait and define your compatibility with other users.
• After completing the survey, the system will calculate your compatibility with other users in various dimensions and display the information in their profiles without revealing the answers.

The Elizium team noted that it helps quickly understand how compatible people are and save time generally wasted on “useless communication.” And even if you like someone, the algorithm will warn you about possible conflicts.

Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that you can check your compatibility with people you already know. For that, you should search people by their unique profile ID. You may share this ID and the results of the system analysis on social media.

Like other similar apps, Elizium has a chat. You can “wow” or make a virtual present to a person you like and pay for it through Apple Pay.

Plans

The developers have announced a new feature. It will not only calculate the compatibility between users but also automatically search for the best matches.

“This feature will be called “Perfect match in one click.” You will need to press a button, and the system will pick only those who are an optimal match for you in all life aspects. You will have to pick a user you like and start the communication.”

The AIN.UA journalist has talked to Arseniy Feshchenko, bird founder and product designer, and learned why LUN needed another apartments search engine, how it develops, and why it will not expand within Ukraine, working only in Kyiv.

How and Why an apartment rental app bird was created

It began in 2017. Every Friday at lunch, a team of four people, including Denis Tsyganok, LUN co-founder, and Arseniy Feshchenko, designer at that time, gathered and dreamed of how the search of the apartment will look in the future. Then they finally visualized their ideas and developed a concept in 2020. They imagined an app where users can choose apartments on a 3D map only. There will be no lists. You can virtually visit each location and buy the favored one for hundreds of thousands of dollars, using Touch ID.

At that time, LUN already has had the Flatfy product for Ukraine — an apartments search engine for the secondary market where you can find an apartment within Ukraine to buy or rent it. So, they decided to do some experiments and create a “future app” based on the 2020 concept under an entirely new brand and for the city of Kyiv only — bird.

“It was much harder to develop and launch an app for LUN or Flatfy because their users would have high expectations. And they started a new product — an apartment rental app bird. Nobody has known it. So, there were no expectations. When there are no expectations, the start is much easier,” said Arseniy Feshchenko, the founder and product designer of bird.

bird app rental features for apartment search

bird works like an aggregator — it collects ads from 24 different real estate rental platforms, including DOM.RIA, Country.ua, OLX, Rieltor.ua, 100rielty.ua, and other smaller agencies. A crucial element of the app and the main part of the search is the 3D map. “As an opposite to websites with a list of apartments and addresses, streets, and metro stations. To understand where they are, you need to copy and paste the address into Google Maps. This all was the main problem we wanted to solve with the map as the biggest advantage of bird,” explained Feshchenko.

The app was launched in December 2018. The first version contained no filter or other navigation buttons — it had only the 3D map with highlighted houses where someone leases apartments. We used the Mapbox solution to create it because Apple and Google Maps could not display a huge number of objects and select some of them.

New features arose after users delivered feedback and their wishes in App Store or via Telegram to the bird team. So, soon after the start, developers added room numbers, budget, renovation, and favorite filters. Now there are coming two most desired filters — “pet-friendly” and “children-friendly.”

In 2019, the app won two Red Dot nominations — Interface & User Experience and Apps. However, Arseniy said that he is not satisfied with the slider bar — a solution that allows you to set a price range by the search:

“The users wanted it so much, but we tried to postpone its release as much as possible. We spent about a year studying it fundamentally and did create it. Because ‘price from’ is a very doubtful parameter. We learned that users want to skip fake ads and irrelevant apartments using it.”

Bird AI — a solution for eliminating fakes

The minimum value of the ‘price from’ is currently equal to 6,000 UAH (approx. $225). Our team wanted to make it better and presented an AI-driven solution on the second bird anniversary. It can check ads and discover fake ones: “One day, we realized that we want to be more than just an apartment search app for the users. That we want to help them all the way during the renting process.”

Thanks to a set of 25 parameters, Bird AI can up to 95% certainty discover fraud ads to be removed from the app. Bird AI was developed in cooperation with the LUN team that specializes in developing AI solutions called Flair. “We trained bird AI to find fake ads according to our database of fakes that we collected manually. It was a pretty complicated task because even a sophisticated real estate expert can’t always find all of them,” Feshchenko recalls.

In addition, bird AI looks for all the ads for the same apartment on different platforms, creating a price range on their basis, and filters proposals with “granny-style design.”

Select function and product monetization

In July 2021, bird has got an update with a new feature in the app — select. It is a section with manually filtered freshly renovated apartments in new buildings with moderate+ prices — from $800. The best thing about the bird select feature is video room tours in the story format. According to Feshchenko, they should replace offline visits because visiting apartments is a big pain in the ass for realtors.

Another problem here could be the communication with realtors. To minimize it, you can book an apartment tour in the bird select section by pressing the button “Book a room tour.” After that, you can schedule your visit via Telegram.

bird select now is the single way to monetize the app. The realtors pay a fee of 12.5% of each rental deal. Currently, there are about 30 apartments in this section. We plan to develop and extend bird to other markets. The app will not work in other cities of Ukraine.

bird is a product that encourages you to break new ground. In Ukraine, we already have a successful app Flatfy and understand what other Ukrainian cities need. We want to make expansions to new markets where we will face many new challenges for sure. At the moment, the development of an Android version or adapting it for iPad is not on the list. Arseniy confirmed the iOS version priority: “We want to move at the maximum speed — that is our motto.”

How it works

The service supports EU COVID Certificates (also called “Digital Green Certificates”), which were launched in the European Union in the summer of 2021.

• For iOS users, the certificate digitized with YOUR PASS will appear in Wallet, which is preinstalled on all Apple devices.
• For Android users, the company has developed a free YourWallet application, an alternative to Apple Wallet. You can download it from Google Play.

To add a COVID Certificate to YOUR PASS:

• Go to the company’s website using a browser on your computer or mobile device
• Click ‘Create yours’
• Accept the terms of the privacy policy;
• Scan the QR-code of your COVID Certificate or upload a screenshot of the QR-code in PDF, JPG, or PNG format.
• After scanning, add the COVID certificate to your mobile wallet.

Interestingly, the certificates generated in YOUR PASS are displayed in the same language in which your mobile device is running. If you want to change the document language, you need to change the default system language in the phone settings.

In one year, the startup’s team has tripled, and its revenue has grown sixfold.

Headway is an educational app that helps get through a book in 15 minutes. It contains summaries and highlights of 1,000+ non-fiction books on business, motivation, and psychology. They are categorized and available in text and audio formats.

The app was created by the developers of a startup of the same name in March 2019 to help people all around the world learn and grow.

In two years, more than 7 million users have downloaded the app. Headway is used across 140 countries, mostly in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and India. In the summer of 2021, over 500,000 people a month joined using the app.

“It’s an achievement of the entire team because people are the backbone of Headway. We believe in the power of self-development and create incredible things. This is what allowed us to grow from three people in a startup to 90 in two years, and this is just the beginning,” comments Anton Pavlovsky, CEO and founder of Headway.

As the startup stated, Headway is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the ecosystem of Genesis Holding Company. In the last year alone, the startup’s team has tripled, and revenue has increased sixfold.

• The funds came from Olya Nikitova, an angel investor.
• According to Obimy representatives, the startup’s valuation at the time of the raising of the investment was $2 million, which is almost a three-fold increase over the previous valuation.
• The raised funds will go toward new Obimy app prototype development, marketing, and launching a trial of the app in the US and South Korea.
• Besides, part of the raised capital will be used to prepare for round A, which the team plans to raise partly in the United States and partly in Asia.
• In 2020, Obimy raised $25,000 of investment from the Ukrainian Startup Fund.

“We seriously revised our approach towards the new user interface. Already having a large user base, we will be determining what they value in Obimy. Also, we have a stronger team now,” comments Jenya Zasutsky, founder of Obimy.

What is Obimy

• Obimy is an app to keep emotional connections between family members. It was launched by architect Jenya Zasutsky and the tech company Empat.
• Using the app, users can share pleasant gestures, “touches” and tell partners about their moods.

• Obimy uses biometric data provided by smartphones —users can see the number of steps walked by their partners, sense heart rhythm. Also, the app shows the total time spent with a partner during the day, month, and year.

About Shared Inboxes

The new feature allows several team members to send and receive emails having a shared account. Also, users can:

• assign emails to themselves or other team members
• discuss emails in a private chat
• compose emails together in real time
• set deadlines for assigned emails

All new emails in a shared inbox are automatically available to anyone who has access to it. Spark notifies a specific person if an email is assigned to that person and when it is marked as done.

Who the feature is available to

The feature Shared Inboxes is available to Spark for Teams users with Gmail or Google Workplace accounts. The Shared Inboxes feature is part of the Premium offering in Spark for Teams. The subscription cost in 2021 is $7.99 per user/month or $6.40 per user/month if you buy the annual plan.

At the time of publication, this feature is available in Spark for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The Android version will appear in July 2021, the company says.

How to enable the shared inbox

• Launch Spark and ensure that you update to the latest version
• Open Spark’s Preferences and click on the ‘Accounts’ tab
• Under ‘Private Accounts,’ locate the account you want to share
• Click on ‘Share Account with Team’ at the bottom right

• Select your team and confirm that you indeed want to share the account with that team on the next screen
• Now under the ‘Members’ tab on the right, you can Add/Remove team members who have access to this Shared Inbox.

Eligibility and requirements

As Google stated, the company aims to help developers scale their services beyond mobile and across all the form factors that are important to users.

“Through these integrations, we enable new discovery and re-engagement opportunities for developers to accelerate their overall growth on Play and offer a service fee of 15% during the program term, all to help developers deliver premium experiences,” Google said.

But in order to participate in the program and receive a reduced fee of up to 15%, the application must meet the following requirements:

• Primary app offering of premium video, audio, or books content (not user generated)
• Over 100,000 monthly active installs on Google Play
• High quality user experience with strong Google Play rating
• Developer account in good standing
• Integration of specific Google platforms and APIs based on type of media content

Also, additional requirements may apply to the application depending on the type of media content:

Video apps

• First and foremost, the app should offer living room-first video programs such as movies, TV shows, live sports, and news
• Android TV, Google TV, Cast platforms with cross device playback and sign-in integrations
• Smart recommendations to easily find content, easier sign-up and sign-in, and enhanced discovery

Audio apps

• Premium music and audio content via subscription
• WearOS, Android Auto, AndroidTV, and Google Cast platforms
• Content discovery and continued listening across devices

Book apps

• Premium books, audiobooks, and comics
• Tablet and foldable optimizations, Entertainment Space. WearOS and Android Auto for audiobooks apps
• Improved reading experience and content discovery and re-engagement throughout Entertainment Space

However, this special program will be available only for developers whose revenue from the app exceeds $1 million. If your app fits all the requirements, you can apply by clicking here.

Why it is important

In November 2020, the developer of Fortnite, Epic Games, circumvented a 30% fee on the App Store and Google Play, and the game was instantly removed from the app stores. This situation once again raised the issue of high fees on these platforms.

Epic Games created an entire coalition against platform owners and exorbitant fees, which was joined by Tinder, Spotify, Deezer, and dozens of smaller developers. As a result, the platform holders had to make concessions and lower the fee. Play Media Experience is the result of this confrontation.

About memoryOS

memoryOS is an application that trains the user’s memory in a gamified way. It offers a series of interactive, quizzes-based micro-lessons designed to help the user to remember information quickly without getting them tired of the learning process.

“We’ve merged together the latest virtual technology with immersive 3D gaming and created the most enjoyable and efficient tool for improving your memory and mental sharpness and keeping your brain alive,” reads the description on Kickstarter.

As the founders state, even after a short demo session, app users were able to improve their results by 60-70%.

Startup founders and team

The Ukrainian Alex Ruzh is CEO and co-founder of memoryOS. About ten people are working on the project in total. The development of the app involved cooperation with Jonas von Essen, a two-time world memory champion who is listed as a co-founder of the startup.

What is featuring in the App Store all about?

Featuring is about promoting mobile applications and games in the form of topical collections in the App Store application. It is a list of Apple’s recommendations. You can see these lists on the home screen when you open the App Store, so it’s a great honor to be there.  

In fact, App Store advertises your  application or a game for free. The Apple team describes your product and chooses  the principle according to which these lists are made.

Each country has its own App Store with its own ranking of games and apps since its users have their own country-specific preferences and needs. Headway was featured in the education category 92 times in the UK, India, Australia, and Canada. Also, in the UK and Ireland, Headway received the “App of the Day” status four times – that is, the Headway logo and name were the first things people saw when they opened the App Store.

Who might want to get featured and why?

1. Developers of games and apps. It allows you to introduce yourself, to get organic traffic and installations for free, and, of course, it boosts your reputation. If you’ve been featured, Apple thinks you’re cool.
2. Users. The topical collections help you quickly find the app you need if you don’t have a specific one in mind. The “App of the Day” prompts the user to download a completely new product.
3. Apple. To get featured, a team must come up with a great product. That improves the quality of the apps listed in the App Store and helps meet the needs of every user.

What do you need to do to get featured?

• File a request by filling out a special form on the Apple website. Indicate a name, describe a product, and provide a link. 
• Of course, you have to get ready by getting rid of design bugs and shortcomings as best you can. After you are done, update screenshots and product descriptions in the App Store and take care of negative comments. 
• It is very important to write a great cover story “About the product” that will sell or won’t sell your product to the editors of the App Store collections.
• And then wait. If the application is approved (that is, the editor has found your product worthy of attention), the developers will get access to a page in Apple Connect where they need to present the product in detail by the indicated deadline.
• Allow time to moderate your content. If you submit your application an hour before the deadline, it is highly likely you will be late. We ran the risk of missing the deadline because we did not take into account the ban on showing devices that refer to Apple in visual materials. And given the fact that our episode was about a smartphone (which looks like an iPhone by default), we had to do everything over again and within the shortest time possible. You will be provided with a to-do/not-to-do checklist to be studied.

Five factors to consider if you want to get featured

1. The promise of the product is confirmed by numbers, namely, the number of downloads, ratings, and earnings;
2. An app has a unique story, a technical solution, or a specific problem it solves. This could be a note-taking app, a handy solution for millions, or a fitness tracker for disabled swimmers.
3. The app has been localized in many countries.
4. The app and its App Store page are regularly updated.                
5. The application is nice, understandable, and user-friendly. Amen!

100% paid products are rarely featured. The editor is more likely to choose an app that works by subscription.

Column “Rumor has it.” It is believed that Apple willingly features applications that have iPad and Apple Watch versions. This is an unwritten rule, but practice shows that it works. Relying on this information, we adapted the application for an iPad within three days (and three nights).

Headway did not submit an application – Apple offered us to get featured

An App Store representative contacted us via the email address indicated in the Headway description. We immediately got a page in Apple Connect, were asked to introduce ourselves, and to prepare some visual materials. We had two weeks to do this. It came out of the blue, so we had to work at night and on weekends. We planned every single step and allocated the necessary resources. The entire team pitched in. It was great. Everyone knew what we were doing and, most importantly, why we were doing it. Then I realized that the key to success in getting featured and the success of the product itself depends on teamwork.

As a result, we have been featured 96 times in 144 countries.  

What are the benefits of featuring for Apple?

• To date, featuring has brought 20,000 new organic users. In general, the number of organic views will grow from 50 to 150% on the days of big featuring (that is what we call getting to the home screen or any featuring in a large number of countries).
• A mark on the application page that it was featured as the “Application of the Day.” Since it is visible to potential users, it is likely to increase the number of installations.
• Display priority. When a user is looking for an application that was featured, a block with an editorial article shows up in the search results. It pushes aside the following results, so the probability that the user will notice your app is higher. 

• Apple has offered Headway to place a demo app on company gadgets in offline stores. The default apps are chosen by Apple rather than the store. Headway is now available on iPhones and iPads in Apple stores in over 35 countries, including the UK, US, and China.
• “Friendship” with Apple has boosted brand awareness and reputation. For example, when Apple gives a big presentation, your app might hit the screen and get noticed by a potential audience. I’m sure we are going to see Headway at the WWDC presentation very soon.

Author: Anatolii Denysiuk, Head of UX/UI at Headway

Landing page

• Carrd is an online platform for quick and easy website creation. The Pro plan will cost a user only $19 per year.

Database

• Airtable is a program for organizing a database in the form of a spreadsheet. The service also offers features for joint projects. According to Coiffard, the free plan is enough to test the product.

Monetization and payment services

• Gumroad and Flurly App are online platforms for selling digital products. Gumroad has a paid plan – a user will get access to additional features and a reduced commission for $10 a month.
• Stripe, a service that allows companies to receive online payments in several currencies.

Communication

• Crisp is an all-in-one multichannel messaging platform that connects companies and customers.

Design

• Canva and Figma are online services that are suitable for both design novices, professional designers and web developers.

Application Hosting

• Netlify is a hosting service that provides a non-stop back-end for static sites.
• Heroku is a PaaS platform, where your application can be placed entirely in the cloud for $6 per month.

Automation

• Such online tools like Zapier, Integromat, n8n.io will help a user with process automation. These platforms also allow you to share data between different web applications.

Analytics

• In addition to Google Analytics, you can also use Plausible and Fathom, which are more privacy-focused solutions.
• Hotjar and Fullstory can help a user to analyze traffic data.

Mailing

• Mailchimp is a marketing mailing service, and Mailjet is a transactional mailing service.

Naming and domain name

NameMesh, Namelix, Namechk are tools for generating company names and domain names.

Working with documents

• To organize work with documents, you can use Notion. If you need to make a quick website with information created with this tool, you can use Potion.
• Coda is a service that optimizes and systematizes joint work with documents of different formats.

Feedback forms

• Typeform and TallyForms are services for creating online forms.

AIN.UA editor tells the details of the story.

On April 3, 2020, the customer hired a programmer (private entrepreneur) to develop an iOS application for Rooki.net service and publish it in the App Store. The parties concluded an agreement. The customer transferred UAH 40,500 to the developer for the work. According to the case file, the programmer wrote the application, but the customer was unable to test it due to some flaws.

The customer filed a lawsuit against the programmer because he believes that the latter poorly fulfilled his obligations and did not fulfill the contract’s terms. The plaintiff asked the court to terminate the agreement and recover material losses from the programmer in the amount of UAH 48,500 and UAH 10,000 in moral damages.

On September 25, the Sykhivskiy District Court of Lviv accepted the claim for consideration. On March 16, 2021, the court ruled against the plaintiff. The court made this decision because it established that on May 6, 2020, the programmer fulfilled the obligations under the contract “in full,”i.e., created a working Rooki application verified by the plaintiff, which was transferred to the App Store platform. The court did not find evidence that the plaintiff had drawn up a bilateral document with a list of necessary improvements and a deadline for completion on the app. Also, the court did not find evidence that the customer corresponded with the contractor and told him about the claims and flaws in the application.

At the same time, the customer (who wished to remain anonymous) in the commentary to AIN.UA said that the FOP (private entrepreneur) had missed the application development deadline and refused to make the necessary improvements to it, and erased all correspondence as soon as he received a complaint from the customer:

“The applications (Android and iOS) were developed for volunteer assistance to the elderly. Problems arose in the performer’s dishonest attitude: deadlines were disrupted, the application, as a result, did not meet the App Store requirements due to the lack of a volunteer verification mechanism. As a result, the contractor refused to make the necessary improvements to the application, and after receiving the claim, he erased all the correspondence in Telegram.”

It should be noted that the Android version of the Rooki app was published on Google Play in April 2020 (in the same month, the contract for the development of the iOS app was concluded as well).

The third party in the case is the Ukrainian office of Apple. In December 2020, the same court ruled to request data from Apple concerning the reason why the app was not published on the online store, as well as whether this decision was due to technical or software flaws in the app.

The customer of the application does not agree with the court’s decision and is now preparing an appeal.

The list of recommended applications from Google includes the Ukrainian application Reface.

Create something new

1. Collage.new: Create inspiring images with BeFunky’s collage creation tool.
2. Resume.new: If you’re looking for a new job this year, perk up your resume with one of CV2You’s customizable templates.
3. Hire.new: If you’re looking for new employees in 2021, with ZipRecruiter, you can post your job opening and find quality candidates to join your team in no time.
4. Site.new: Would you like to create a website? With easy-to-use tools and professionally designed templates, you can launch your website with Google Sites.
5. Shopify.new: With Shopify’s powerful tools, anyone can quickly start a business and launch an online store.
6. Flutter.new: Come up with a great idea for an app? Do it in the new year with Google’s toolkit for creating beautiful web, desktop, and mobile applications.

Get a new experience

1. Puppr.app: If you have a dog, get help training your furry friend with lessons and live chat.
2. Uhmmm.app: Fight awkward silence in your online meetings using free music.
3. Sayana.app: Track your thoughts and feelings, get tips on how to deal with your emotions and talk to people in similar life situations.
4. Glitterly.app: Create videos with animations and effects using stock videos and images in just a few clicks.
5. Get.reface.app: Use your selfies to make fun face swap videos and gifs.

Step up to the new level

1. Nxt.page: Recreate a spontaneous online meeting with friends and colleagues with an extension for Chrome.
2. Funnies.page: Start your morning with humor by getting five new comics from artists around the world, delivered daily to your inbox.
3. Web.page: Find new design ideas, track website trends and techniques.
4. Volition.page: Track your goals and progress anytime, anywhere with this web app.
5. Byline.page: Want to start writing books? Try Byline’s multiplayer app, where you build stories line by line, knowing only what the previous author has written.

Make development easier

1. Projectjob.dev: Find and hire developers who perfectly match your requirements by reviewing examples of their work.
2. Htmldom.dev: Try this handy guide for managing web pages with Javascript.
3. Nodesign.dev: Use existing design tools to complete your development project.
4. Practice.dev: If you believe that practice will lead to excellence, you can improve your skills by solving real web development challenges and learn by practicing.
5. Daily.dev: Get the latest developer news from tech blogs on any topic you can think of, all in one place.

Funding details

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from the American angel investor TQ Ventures and other business angels.

According to the Reface representatives, the $5.5 million raised is planned to be spent to launch a social platform for content personalization through machine learning. According to Dima Shvets, co-founder and CBO of Reface, Andreessen Horowitz’s funds and network of contacts will also help expand partnerships and sign long-term contracts with music labels, movie studios, and celebrities.

“Over the last six months, Reface has demonstrated explosive growth, reaching the level of 70 million downloads. The funding from Andreessen Horowitz will help us maintain and accelerate growth, empower the team with new talents, and enhance the technology. We are currently working on a tool for the recognition of synthesized videos to ensure responsible use of our technology,” commented Denys Dmytrenko, co-founder of Reface.

About Reface

The first version of the swap-face application called Doublicat was launched in January 2020. Later it was renamed Reface, and in August, the application topped the American AppStore, being ahead of TikTok and Instagram. Since its launch in January, it was downloaded 70 million times and used by many American stars.

The project has seven co-founders: Roman Mogylnyi, Oles Petriv, Yaroslav Boiko, Ivan Altsybieiev, Denys Dmytrenko, Dima Shvets, and Kyle Sygyda.

The Reface R&D office is located in Kyiv. In 2020, the startup team consists of 100 people.

To recap, two Ukrainian startups, which worked in a similar direction, were acquired by the American company Snap: startup Looksery for $150 million and AI Factory for $166 million.

Users’ Choice 2020 was awarded to Disney+. The award for the best game went to SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off and the winner of Best App 2020 is Loóna: Bedtime Calm & Relax.

This year, Google Play’s Best of 2020 includes the Ukrainian application Reface, taking fourth place in the Best for Fun category.

About Reface

Reface is one of the projects of the Ukrainian startup RefaceAI, founded by Roman Mogylnyi, Oles Petriv, and Yaroslav Boiko in 2011. Later, Ivan Altsybieiev, Denys Dmytrenko, Dima Shvets, and Kyle Sygyda joined them. The R&D center of the company is located in Kyiv.

RefaceAI develops AI technology to swap faces in photos, GIFs, and videos. Influencers in social media often use the application of the company.

The Ukrainian application took 4th place in the list of the best applications for fun in Google Play in 2020.

Best Apps of 2020

Google Play has announced Loóna: Bedtime Calm & Relax as the best application of 2020.

According to 9to5google, Google also has several lists of the best applications, divided into categories:

Best Android Games of 2020

Google named Genshin Impact as Android’s Best Game of 2020 for “exceeding expectations and delivering compelling, accessible, genre-defining experiences.”

As with applications, Google Play has also created separate “lists of the best”, divided into categories:

Also, Reface was ranked second in the Overall Free Apps category, being ahead of YouTube, Gmail, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger.

About Reface

Reface (previously Doublicat) is one of the projects of the Ukrainian startup RefaceAI, founded by Roman Mogylnyi, Oles Petriv, and Yaroslav Boiko in 2011. Later, Ivan Altsybieiev, Denys Dmytrenko, Dima Shvets, and Kyle Sygyda joined them. The R&D center of the company is located in Kyiv.

RefaceAI develops AI technology to swap faces in photos, GIFs, and videos. Influencers in social media often use the application of the company.

According to developers, unlike other face-swapping applications, they do not use CGI or 3D-modelling. The technology is based only on AI, they use generative adversarial networks, known as GAN.

The startup’s portfolio also includes other viral applications. For example, Reflect allows you to change faces in your photos.

How did it get the top

According to Roman Mogylnyi, the application has already crossed the mark of 27 million downloads. The application is also a success on Android: Reface App ranks first in the Entertainment Google Play category in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and 14 other countries. In the USA, it is No. 4.

He also added that 90% growth of the Reface app is organic, and only 10% comes from marketing.

“One of the triggers of popularity in the App Store was the recent articles on Techcrunch and VICE. Another factor of virality is social networks of celebrities, which use the Reface App and make regular posts on Instagram. Among them are Britney Spears, Snoop Dogg, Dua Lipa, Trevor Noah. They posted not once or twice, but use it regularly. Users like personalized digitized content, and, as experience shows, when it is of high quality, they will come back again and again.

The fact that we are constantly improving the technology itself has also affected our success. Initially, it was possible to make only face swap in GIF, now this feature is also available for creating high-quality videos,” Roman Mogylnyi explains.

The startup’s staff grew by 30% as well. Currently, it employs over 50 people in the Kyiv office. RefaceAI continues to strengthen the technical team.

How it works

• The application is available for download on iOS and Android.
• To forecast the future, click ‘Try’ and upload a photo.
• After analysis, you can save the photo to a gallery and publish it to social media.
• The application is chargeable. The monthly access charge will be $20. However, the user can try the app for free during a 3-day trial period.

Ukrainian roots

The cofounders of Gradient are Ukrainian Vladislav Urazov and Russian Bogdan Matveev. Previously, they worked together on the Teleport project, a viral photo editor for hair dyeing.

In 2017, Snap acquired the app for $8 million, and their partners incorporated a new company, Ticket to the Moon, Inc. with registration in the U.S. state of Delaware. There, Urazov is a chief executive officer, and Matveev is a chief technical officer.

iOS apps in Setapp

The list includes popular Setapp applications, among them are:

Most likely, the list of applications will be expanded.

How it works

• To use the Setapp apps, you have to register your iPhone or iPad. You can do it in the “My Devices” section.
• For each extra device, customers will have to pay an additional $4.99/month.

• The minimum system requirement for iOS devices (iPhone or iPad) is iOS 10.3 or newer. The iOS version will also be available during a free trial week.
• After adding a new device, you must open Setapp on macOS and select “Available on iOS” from the menu on the left.
• In the list of available applications, select the app you want to install and click on “iOS application.” A QR code will appear on the screen and you have to scan it using your iPhone or iPad.
• Then the AppStore opens, where you can install the application.

• As a result of successful installation and activation, you will receive a notification on your macOS device.

It is noteworthy that mobile applications are not available to team subscription users. The Setapp team has specified that it is working on improving this tariff plan.

About Setapp

Setapp is a subscription-based macOS application service launched in 2017. For $9.99/month, the user gets access to 190 applications. All application updates in Setapp are free.

“Today, we’re excited to provide the option for people to use their favorite applications on their mobile devices wherever they are. We are confident that this will open up new opportunities for productivity improvement and task fulfillment,” Oleksandr Kosovan, founder and CEO of Setapp, commented on the launch of iOS versions.

How does the service work?

Odrey can work both as a voice message transcriber, and as a voice recorder. Meaning, you can record your voice message using the application, or play files to it, or simply upload files to the app from your device. The application can transcribe recorded speech from both audio and video files.

AIN.UA’s reporter has checked how the app works: it recognizes texts in Ukrainian and Russian quite accurately and quickly.

The text is transcribed into notes, and then it can be edited, saved, and posted to social media and messengers. In places where speakers take long pauses, the app will automatically break the text into paragraphs.

“The technology is the same as for Siri, Speech Recognition. Accordingly, the accuracy matches that of Siri,” Oleksandr points out.

Which languages does it support?

The app works with 30 languages, including Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, several varieties of English (Canadian, US American, British, Australian, New Zealand English), French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Hindi, Spanish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, etc.

How much is it?

The application has both a free and a paid version. In the free one, the recording length is limited to 15 minutes. The paid subscription costs $1.99 per month and has no recording length limit.

What does RefaceAI do?

RefaceAI develops AI technology to swap faces in photos, GIFs, and videos. In other words, you can paste the face of a person on the face of another one in a photo or video, given the facial expressions. Previously, we wrote about the Doublicat app, in a few months after its release, it was downloaded more than 900,000 times. The technology used by the startup team works as follows:

The RefaceAI company was founded by Roman Mogylnyi, Oles Petriv, and Yaroslav Boiko in 2011. It was called Neocortext at that time. At first, the team was engaged in machine learning – from working with text semantics to visual content. Currently, the company has focused on its AI face-swapping technology.

The R&D center of RefaceAI is located in Kyiv. At first, the company employed 12 people, but now its staff has grown to 40 specialists.

How does the technology work and where is it used?

According to developers, unlike other face-swapping applications, they do not use CGI or 3D-modelling. The technology is based only on AI, they use generative adversarial networks, known as GAN.

The startup already worked with companies from the entertainment industry, cinema, advertising. For example, their technology was used in “Movie Selfie” in the Multiplex application: there you could create your own photos like you are a character of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Terminator, etc.

The company’s applications are also used by influencers in social networks. For example, one of Elon Musk’s viral photos was taken using its Reflect application:

Who are the investors of RefaceAI?

The deal will be closed for several more months, and the startup does not disclose its main investors. So far, only one investor is known – Adventures Lab. It has been working in the Ukrainian market since late 2019. Their average investment amount ranges from $100,000 to $500,000.

Where will the funds go?

The company will spend investments on product improvement. The company also plans to expand its business development team and content team, to work on new sources of monetization.

Ethnicity estimate mask

Ethnicity estimate mask for Instagram by Gradient is a fresh example of the company’s viral content. The essence of the new mask is that the users allegedly pass a virtual DNA test, which determines their ethnicity. The mask is available in the application, you can download it for iOS and Android. After the test, a photo with results can be saved to the gallery or published on social media.

Who’s your twin

Who’s your twin mask is the first huge viral success story of Gradient. Back in 2019, a startup created a feature that allowed users to find their celebrity lookalikes: for that, you just had to upload your photo and in a few seconds the application would show Who’s your twin. The mask immediately gained immense popularity, and the corresponding pictures appeared in all social media.

Gradient

One of the founders of Gradient is Ukrainian Vladislav Urazov. Before that, Urazov worked in the founding team of the Teleport application. The application allows you to ‘try on’ various impressions on your selfie. Teleport became viral, it had enormous outreach and spread widely around the world. And in 2017, in the wake of success, Snap acquired it for US$ 8 million. Bogdan Matveev, who was CTO at Teleport, became Vladislav’s new Gradient partner. They are developing the project together.

The company almost immediately was fine-tuned to create viral masks and mechanics like ethnicity estimate mask, which allowed it to quickly gain an audience. A week after the release in September 2019, it had 2 million downloads in the App Store and 1 million downloads in the Google Play Market.

According to the Gradient team, the company creates all the masks with the help of artificial intelligence. Also, as Urazov assures, the team does not collect any user data: the application, according to him, is completely safe.

The application is available for download on iOS and Android. To find out “your historical roots,” click “Try” and upload a photo. After analyzing it, you can save it to a gallery and publish it to social networks.

This is not Gradient’s first viral success. In September 2019, the app got into the App Store top in Ukraine in two days, and in October, it reached the first place in the USA thanks to the function “Which celebrity do you look like?”

Ukrainian roots

The cofounders of Gradient are Ukrainian Vladislav Urazov and Russian Bogdan Matveev. Previously, they worked together on the Teleport project, a viral photo editor for hair dyeing. In 2017, Snap acquired the app for $8 million.

And their partners incorporated a new company – Ticket to the Moon, Inc. with registration in the U.S. state of Delaware. There, Urazov is a chief executive officer and Matveev is a chief technical officer. The VC.RU profile reports that in 2019, the company had about 15 developers from Moscow and Odessa.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed. In 2018, Flawless App entered the Techstars accelerator at a $2 million valuation.

• Abstract develops a version control system intended for designers. Using it, you can work on files together with your team, monitor the progress of work, and organize the design process. TechCrunch calls Abstract as “something of a GitHub for design.” The company, founded in 2015, has already raised $54.2 million in funding.
• The key product of Flawless App is a tool for iOS developers for comparing the expected design and the real app right inside iOS Simulator, founded by Ahmed Sulaiman and Lisa Dziuba in 2015. It is used by developers from Uber, Basecamp, Disney, eBay, Nike, Qiwi, Spotify, and other companies. The project raised a round from angel investor Oleksandr Kosovan and participated in the Techstars London accelerator program.

Currently, the Flawless App team consists of 5 people. They will join the Abstract team, which works remotely.

Having joined Abstract, our team will focus on developing and promoting the Abstract SDK. This initiative will allow developers to integrate Abstract into their systems easily. Also, thanks to the SDK, it will finally be possible to automate many routine design tasks.

Besides, our team will continue to invest in the development of the community of designers and developers, now at a higher level.

Ahmed Sulaiman, co-founder of Flawless App

Flawless App will become an open-source project – developers will open the source code and publish detailed documentation of the application.

The Ukrainian startup has also created several community projects – a blog about mobile development Flawless iOS, a list of Awesome Design Tools, and a mailing list Design Tools Weekly. They will be further developed with the support of Abstract.

In total, Noom has raised $114.7 million in investments. The investors of the project include Sequoia Capital, Samsung Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, etc.

Forbes told the story of the startup, and AIN.UA chose highlights.

Inception

Ukrainian-born Artem Petakov graduated from Princeton University, where he studied psychology and computer science. Then he worked at Microsoft, and later – at Google.

In 2008, he and Saeju Jeong came up with an idea to create an application that would “disrupt the weight loss industry.” It took 8 years to develop it: they founded the company in 2008, and Noom was launched only in 2016. Over the past few years, they have been trying to keep up with the demand for the product and release new versions based on user data.

In 4 years, Noom has more than 50 million downloads, and its revenue for the last year increased four times – to $237 million compared to $61 million in 2018. In 2017, the app earned only $12 million.

Not another weight loss application

The market for digital weight-loss tools is saturated—last year the U.S. market was worth $1.4 billion and is expected to grow.

In the App Store, there are over 200 weight loss applications, including Under Armour’s MyFitnessPal, popular Fitbit and Calm, which offer both physical and mental activities.

These apps are cheaper on a monthly subscription than Noom, which ranks 23rd among health apps in the Apple Store, and its rating in Google Play is 3.9.

According to Petakov, Noom is more like meditation apps such as Headspace or Calm than Weight Watchers for weight control. Noom does not count calories and does not tell the user what to eat and what not to eat. Instead, the app tries to learn the user’s habits, find out what is at the root of their addictions, and help to cope with them.

Subscription fee

Users can buy a subscription to Noom for a period from one month to one year. The trial version is for 14 days and costs from $1 to $18. The average monthly price of a subscription is higher or lower, based on the duration of the program a user selects.

But the company says a four-month package at $129 is most popular, thus a month of use of the service will cost $32.25.

The second-most-popular package is a six-month program at $149 (or $24.83 a month). Shorter plans of one month and two months are $59 and $99, respectively.

How does Noom work?

Noom uses artificial intelligence, evidence-based guidelines of physiology, psychology, and cognitive-behavioral therapy.

“Because we’re changing the brain, our outcomes are durable, 60% of users one year after being on Noom are still maintaining their weight loss,” Petakov says. 

During the four-month program, the average weight loss for people who complete it is 7.5% of their body weight.

Noom users fill in questionnaires and establish goals such as loss of weight or centimeters in the waist. The questions are quite specific and range from a family history of diseases like diabetes or heart disease to what time of day a user tends to eat.

Noom’s coaches help users to achieve their goals, and they can communicate using a messaging feature of the app. Users can also track weight, blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and compile nutrition and exercise history. There is also a food database that includes 3.7 million items.

The team

In late 2019, Noom hired 1,000 coaches to deal with the “holiday rush” when people start taking active care of their health and body. As a result, the number of employees has grown to 1,800.

Noom says that more than 90% of employees are full time and have benefits. The head office is in New York.

Around 100 people of all employees aren’t coaches.

The company was founded by Roman Mogylnyi, Oles Petriv, and Yaroslav Boiko in 2011, it was called Neocortext at that time. At first, the team was engaged in machine learning, from working with text semantics to visual content. Now the company has focused on its AI-face replacement technology. The RefaceAI development office is located in Kyiv. Now the team is also raising the round of investments.

Using a mobile application developed by a startup, you can create GIFs from popular movies, TV shows with you in the “starring role.” To do this, take a selfie and the application itself will paste the photo on the selected video, it looks like this:

Now the application has a set of GIFs, as well as tests “Who are you?” from the series Friends, Sillicon Valley, Game of Thrones, and the movies of Star Wars.

“Unlike other face replacement applications, we do not use CGI or 3D modeling. Our technology is based only on AI. It is based on the machine learning method GAN (Generative Adversary Nets), thanks to which the gifs look so realistic,” according to the company information.

The startup has already worked with companies from the entertainment, film, and advertising industries. For example, their RefaceAI technology was used in the “movie selfie” in the Multiplex application: there you could create your own photos in the character of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Terminator, etc.

The team has joined ProductHunt to conduct a public launch of the project and present the technology. Prior to this, the application was available for the test, users during this time made about a million GIFs.

What’s new in iOS:

• New design. The appearance of the application has completely changed.
• Avatars of senders. Spark shows photos of people and company logo next to messages, helping to quickly navigate in the mailbox.
• Custom set of actions. You can customize Spark to suit your needs and choose which options will be displayed on the lower toolbar when viewing a message (mark as read, delete, reply later, etc.)
• Multi-window support in iPadOS. Now you can read a long message in the left half of the screen and reply in the right.

Dark mode in iOS and Android. The dark theme is available to all users, regardless of the version of the operating system. Spark can also automatically switch to a dark theme if you enable system dark mode in iOS 13 or Android 10.

This application allows you to create amazing lighting parties with thousands of mobile devices. They will flash to the beat of the music. You can use it at concerts, open-air events, and nightclubs.

Monetization

The app is available on iOS, and the Android version will appear by the end of the year.

A one-month subscription costs $2.99. The pro version of the app allows you to convert your music (Apple Music, Spotify), organize “parties,” and invite other users to them. The application is free for guests.

If you know the location of each smartphone, you can create symbols and images from them. A custom light show for large events can be organized at a separate cost. In Ukraine, FlashBeats has already been tested on Atlas Weekend, and other integrations are being prepared.

Plans

FlashBeats now has more than 50,000 downloads, and its key markets are the United States, Japan, and China. According to Kirigetov, they have invested more than $10,000 in the project. They are not looking for investors yet.

What are the terms

Acceleration lasts 4 months. In addition to investments, the team receives mentoring services to the tune of 11,500 euros and a workplace at the Google for Startups office.

In return, the company is required to register as a legal entity in Poland. Greenbin.app has already registered an enterprise in Poznan.

What the company is developing

Greenbin.app is a mobile application designed to facilitate the return of plastic packaging in exchange for a reward. Currently, it is available in early access and only on Android, but the iOS version is underway.

All that a user needs is to scan the QR code on the bottle, leave it in the nearest location according to the map in the application and wait for verification.

Following the verification, customers will receive points and will be able to exchange them for new goods and services, such as movie tickets. Thus, ordinary people will be able to inform the manufacturer that its packaging went for processing, and not to the landfill and not to the forest.

The team calls its project Google Analytics for Waste. The application should help manufacturers meet the standards for the collection and processing of plastic containers. The requirements for plastic recycling in the EU are set as follows: 77% by the end of 2025, and 90% by 2029.

Does it work in Ukraine

Previously, the project was tested in Ukraine too. Greenbin.app collaborated with the station No Waste Ukraine [Editor’s note: Україна без сміття]. Currently, the team is negotiating with one of the largest packaging manufacturers in the country.

The information was confirmed in the company, but not completely, indicating that Kyiv already has a business development manager who will work with Viber customers. The company’s CEO, Djamel Agaoua, emphasized that this is the first step in expanding the business in the country.

“Rakuten Viber views Ukraine as a strategically important market: more than 95% of smartphone owners in the country have installed Viber. We have just been joined by our first employee in Ukraine – head of business development department. He will work from Kyiv and develop partnerships and work with clients of the company. This is only the first step in expanding the company’s business in the country.

The upcoming visit of our employees to Ukraine fully reflects the plans of Rakuten aimed at forging strong partnerships with market participants and developing the company’s ecosystem,” he noted.

Background of the conflict

Kidslox is a Ukrainian startup founded in 2014, which is developing a parental control app for iOS and Android: it allows you to block harmful content and manage the time your children spend on a device. This application uses VPN and MDM (mobile device management) technologies to filter and block content, as well as to block the apps after the set time limit.

Kidslox explained that the startup uses these tools because Apple doesn’t offer other documented ways to implement these features. Still, Apple refused to update the app five times in 2018 due to the use of the company’s tools for “undocumented purposes”. Later, Apple said they changed their rules to prevent apps like Kidslox from collecting data about device owners, which means that the startup’s app will gradually become obsolete. And the alternative was to eliminate its core features.

According to the startup’s CEO, Viktor Yevpak, the startup held long negotiations with Apple. After six months, 19 letters and a few phone calls, the company allowed to use VPN, but banned MDM instead.

That’s when Kidslox appealed against the actions of the company. This company’s policy affected about 17 developers of similar services.

How the problem was solved

AIN.UA learned from the company that Apple “backed up” on this issue. “Apple agreed to cooperate with Kidslox and other parental control apps. This week, the company informed that they have changed the app review criteria and allowed to use the technologies that were available a year ago,” the company reported.

Indeed, the company did recently change app review criteria in the App Store Review Guidelines. The updates also relate to the MDM technology, which parental control applications are allowed to use.

Kidslox’s CEO calls it a big victory, but not the end. The company will continue to uphold the idea that Apple shouldn’t have an exclusive right to screen dependency solutions. “Apple keeps track of screen time only on their devices. We believe that Apple should allow all parental control apps to do this through a public API,” he says.

Earlier Kidslox informed that Apple decided to block updates for similar applications due to the fact that they introduced their own time control solution in summer of 2018 (same time when the issues with updates appeared).

What is the company’s activity?

Kidslox is a Ukrainian startup founded in 2014. It is working on the eponymous parental control application for iOS and Android devices. Kidslox allows you to block harmful content and programs on your child’s phone or tablet, keep track of how much time your child spends on a device, and set time limits for services.

The headquarters of Kidslox is located in Cherkasy. Victor Evpak is the founder and CEO of the startup.

What is the essence of the charges?

Kidslox began to publicly accuse Apple back in 2018: the startup published a blog entry where it stated that the American company was “killing the industry” of parental control. In the Kidslox they said that in the summer of 2018, Apple sent a report of a violation of API use rules to a startup and another company from the industry, Qustodio (also filed a complaint with the EU).

The American company noted that the Ukrainian startup violates guidelines on the use of VPN and MDM technologies – mobile device management. These are critical tools for the operation of the Kidslox application. The first allows you to track the time spent in applications, as well as filter unwanted content – for example, pornography. With the help of the second one, the Ukrainian start-up and other developers of the sphere block applications after exceeding the established time limits.

The Kidslox explains: the startup uses these tools because Apple does not offer other documented ways to implement these features. Moreover, representatives of Kidslox noticed that many APIs for VPN and MDM technologies are used not only by manufacturers of applications for parental control but also by other market players.

“We published the app on the App Store in 2014 and have since updated it more than 50 times. During this time, Apple had no complaints about us.”

In Kidslox they said that after its summer message, Apple refused to update the application five times (as of November 2018). The reason is the use of the company’s tools for “undocumented purposes.”

“Kidslox connects these solutions to the fact that Apple has implemented its own time control function. It happened just in the summer of 2018 — with the release of iOS 12: “[Since then], App Store moderators have systematically searched for reasons and ways to exclude other similar applications from the store.”

What does Apple say?

Apple said they revised their rules because of concerns that apps like Kidslox might collect a lot of information about the device owner. Representatives of the American company assured that they made changes not because they presented their similar instrument.

“We treat all applications equally, including those that compete with our own services. Our goal is to create an ecosystem of applications that will give consumers access to as many quality applications as possible.”

What will happen next

Kidslox and other market players point out that Apple is killing the industry of similar applications. “In our case, Apple’s decision effectively prevents us from further improving the application. The only update they will approve is the elimination of the main function. This will obviously betray the trust of tens of thousands of paying users. If we do not update Kidslox, it will eventually become obsolete,” the company wrote in a blog in 2018.

“In conversations with Apple moderators, I said that there must be a compromise because otherwise, it will lead to the death of a startup. More than 30 people work on the application, and you want to close it,” says Viktor Yevpak.

Pablo Ibáñez Colomo, a professor at the London School of Economics, in a commentary for the publication Wired noted that the EU will carefully consider such cases. This is because these decisions will greatly influence the way the application market works together.