WWDC20
Getting Through This Together
In the past few months, the app community has found its own ways to help the world adjust to COVID-19. Throughout the week, we’ll shine a light on developers big and small who are doing their part to help keep everyone safe and engaged.
HomeCourt
A few weeks after the pandemic started, NEX Team cofounder Philip Lam noticed something unusual about HomeCourt, his company’s basketball-training app: Users were hacking it.
Unable to get to gyms and courts, athletes figured out how to adapt the app’s groundbreaking artificial intelligence—designed to track basketball shots, dribbles, and passes with an iPhone or iPad camera—for soccer, in-line skating, hockey, and other sports. “There’s no way for us to determine if you’re using a basketball,” says Lam. “People started noticing that it just worked.”
HomeCourt’s engineers sprang into action, creating soccer dribbling drills and coming up with new strength and agility activities that could be done while sheltering in place. The team also decided to make the app free for two months.
Usage boomed among not only hoopers at home but NBA players. Coaches from Philadelphia to New Zealand to Thailand turned to HomeCourt to run practices and remote tournaments. “This is all a bit of an experiment,” says Lam, “but we’re seeing something we’ve never seen before.”
Sky: Children of the Light
Jenova Chen designed Sky: Children of the Light to encourage cooperation rather than competition among players, so he wasn’t entirely surprised when the game’s 20 million–strong community rallied to respond to the pandemic.
As a result, the team added an element in the game to support relief efforts in the real world. Through the Days of Healing event, players could purchase a special candle pack, with 100 percent of the revenue going to Doctors Without Borders—and receive a virtual flower accessory for their character to show their support. “It was like the little badge that says, ‘I voted,’” says Chen.
Chen was shocked by the response. As of mid-June, the campaign had raised more than $900,000.
“We’re a small company, and we were able to help donate nearly a million dollars,” he says. “That’s the power of the will of the people.”
Headspace
Meditation app developer Headspace’s first move was to make the app’s premium Headspace Plus content—including meditations and sleep exercises—free to health-care and front-line workers; more than 100,000 signed up in the first week alone.
The company went on to partner with New York officials to create content for residents in the hard-hit state; soon after, the office of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer reached out to ask for the same. A partnership with Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health gives residents free access until the end of the year.
Recently, Headspace offered free access to Headspace Plus for a year to anyone currently unemployed or furloughed. “We learned it wasn’t just the stress of the idea of potentially contracting COVID,” says Deborah Hyun, vice president of global marketing. “Extended periods of self-isolation, potential economic distress, sudden job loss, parents staying home—all of these factors are really impacting everyone.”
Want to learn more about developing apps and games? Check out the Apple Developer app to read profiles of inspiring developers and designers and stream sessions from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).