apple: How these app developers took the road less travelled with support from Apple – Times of India

A 20-minute quick chat with Vastsal Signal and there’s a good chance you will feel that you eat a ridiculous amount of unhealthy food and aren’t really in the best of shape. That’s because Signal — and his partner Mohit Kumar — are behind Ultrahuman. Ultrahuman is a wearable — with app support — that continuously manages your glucose. The wearable sticks on your body like a patch and has a microfilament that can read from the interstitial tissue and not through blood. What it does, explains Singhal, is that it gives you “real-time data and gives the true sense of your body”. One bad meal and the glucose levels can go up to tell you how to ‘fix’ it.
Singhal and Kumar used to run Runnr, a logistics service startup, which was acquired by Zomato in 2017. Ultrahuman got a lot of support from Apple’s App Accelerator in terms of design, and getting the right feedback among other things. Good health, as they say, has no price, but Ultrahuman does come at a substantial cost. For a year’s subscription, you will have to shell out Rs 1.1 lakh for the sensor and the app support. You do get ‘cheaper’ plans but those are duration bound. Singhal knows that it is a niche product with an even niche audience but Ultrahuman is reaching out to the right people. These include elite athletes, Bollywood celebs — those who value fitness. “We know that it’s a premium product but are confident that its value will be appreciated by the hardcore fitness enthusiasts.”

If Ultrahuman was meant to target a niche audience, Stamurai’s inception was down to personal struggles and the need to fill a void that needs to be seriously looked at. You may know that stuttering is a genuine issue that a lot of people deal with. Anshul Agrawal was one of them. He along with two other friends started Stamurai, an app that is out there to help those who suffer from stuttering and other speech-related problems. “I stuttered from childhood and it had an impact on everything I did,” says Agrawal. A graduate from IIT-Delhi, Agrawal and his partner Meet Singhal saw that there are just about 4,000 recognised speech therapists in the country. An estimated 60 million people suffer from speech disorders. Stamurai wants to fill that gap. In the last couple of years, the app has seen more than 200,000 downloads, one-third of them have been from India. Since its inception, the app has come a long way. There are therapists that are part of the team and there has been supported from Apple’s App Accelerator. “In terms of UI and design, Apple has helped us better the app in many ways,” says Agrawal.
In my Shadow is one of those indie games that genuinely makes you think. Nakul Verma runs a Gurgaon-based indie studio and gaming has been his “thing” for a while now. He worked as a data analyst but deep down knew gaming was his true calling. He went on to create In My Shadow. Back in 2018, he applied for the India Game Developer Conference and ended up going to San Francisco. “That’s when things really changed as I met developers who were doing some insane stuff.” He came back, quit his job and worked on the game.

In My Shadow is available on Steam, App Store, PlayStation as well as Xbox. “My dream was to feature my game as Game of the Day on the App Store,” he says. He got in touch with Apple and they loved the game. “I was offered support, suggestions and feedback to make it better.” And soon the game did end up as Game of the Day on the App Store.