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.
VSCO
For Mental Health Awareness Month in May, photo app maker VSCO partnered with streetwear behemoth VFILES to explore creativity and wellness during difficult times.
The VSCO app’s mostly Gen Z community (75 percent are under 25) were invited to submit portraits they’d taken at home with subjects and props they had at hand. “It was inspiring to see our community’s creativity through the lens of wellness,” says Shavone Charles, who led the collaboration for VSCO. “We were really moved.”
The month wrapped with an open and honest livestreamed discussion about mental health and self-care for young creatives.
OpenTable
What do you do when your company’s app helps people book restaurant reservations—but most dining rooms have been shuttered?
Sameer Mahmood, OpenTable’s head of product for mobile apps, broached the subject in the company’s tech leads Slack channel. His message began, “I’ve got a crazy idea.”
What if, he asked, instead of reservations at restaurants, the OpenTable app helped people secure spots at a place they needed to go most: grocery stores.
Within hours, the team had the beginnings of a plan. Within a week, the reservation and waitlist feature for grocery stores was live.
“It was challenging to work remotely on a project that required input from so many people,” said Mahmood. “Ultimately we were motivated by the project’s potential to keep people safe.”
HowWeFeel
Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann was looking for a practical way to help while sheltering at home when a high school friend, CRISPR gene-editing pioneer Feng Zhang, reached out.
Wide-scale COVID-19 testing was a ways off, Silbermann recalls. “But he said, ‘You’re in consumer apps, and I’m in testing—maybe we can put something together?”
A few weeks later they released HowWeFeel, an app that seeks to helps scientists and doctors understand how the disease is spreading by making it easy for anyone, whether healthy or sick, to voluntarily self-report how they’re feeling. After you submit your first health check-in, the app donates a meal through Feeding America.
Built by Pinterest engineers in collaboration with quantitative scientists and public health and biomedical researchers at Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions, HowWeFeel was launched in a matter of weeks. “It’s kind of a ragtag group of academics, designers, and engineers all putting in extra effort,” says Silbermann.
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).