Interviews

Walk Me Up! – An Android app that guarantees to get you out of bed on time

Inc42 Daily Brief

Stay Ahead With Daily News & Analysis on India’s Tech & Startup Economy

Time and tide wait for no man.

-Author Unknown

Time is a precious resource. Managing time is crucial in almost all walks of life. Waking up at the exact moment desired, in the morning or after a short siesta in the afternoon, is difficult for most people. Three final year students of Manipal Institute Of Technology, Manipal : Abhinay Bagaria , Mohammad Shabaz Moosa and Aayush Mawandia developed an innovative app that aims to address this problem.

Abhinay Bagaria is currently pursuing Bachelors in Engineering in Computer Science. He has a keen interest in starting up, he is always on the lookout for new ideas. His previous venture includes EngineeringDuniya.com. Apart from being a tech enthusiast, he also dabbles in stocks.

Mohammad Shabaz Moosa has been a web developer for 3 years and has built 20-30 websites that have had over half a billion page views. He enjoys coding and reading technical articles all day and recently developed an interest for Android app development and ‘Walk Me Up’ happens to be his first published app. He has won numerous coding and application development competitions in national level technical fests organized by colleges, IEEE, IE-CSE

Aayush Mawandia has been a Graphic Designer for a couple of years now, with a background in print as well as Web graphics. He likes to be kept busy with projects all the time and every project he has worked for so far, has taught him something new. Designing becomes fun when the project is interesting and challenging, and the ‘Walk me up’ app is undoubtedly one of the most interesting projects he has ever worked on!

Walk Me Up! is unlike any other alarm app you would have used. It stops ringing only when you have walked a certain number of steps. That’s right, it ‘walks’ you up!. Also this app also has intelligent algorithms to detect shaking. So, if you try to cheat, the app wouldn’t hesitate to punish you!

Other features include:
– Evil mode :It Disables the snooze button
– Set the number of steps to dismiss the alarm
– Voice Assist
– Change the sensitivity of the step counter
– Change the snooze duration
– Add quick alarms
– Apply label to alarm
– Change alarm volume and ringtone
– Set alarms to repeat

As of now a free and paid version of the app are available on the Google play store.

Their current Google play rating is 4.6 .

Inc42 had the opportunity to talk to Abhinay Bagaria and Mohammad Shabaz Moosa :

Inc42: How did you get the idea for this app?

Abhinay: I realized that I wasted a lot of my time in the holidays getting up late in the mornings .On most days I used to hit the snooze button and go back to sleep. I realized that a fool proof alarm app is the need of the hour. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. I came up with the idea of an app that relied on actually getting up from your bed and walking a few steps to disable it.

Inc42: How many people were involved in developing the app?

Abhinay: The team comprised of 3 people in total. I came up with the idea and concept for the app and the features it should have.

Shabaz: I coded the whole app and was involved with testing it out on a smartphone as well. Also a friend,Aayush Mawandia worked part time with us. He designed the UI for the app based on our inputs.

Inc42: How did you execute it? How long did it take to code and test it?

Shabaz: The implementation of dismissing the alarm based on step count was done within a week. UI took around 2-3 weeks…then we had to work on the step counting and shake detection algorithms for another week.

Inc42: How has the reaction been so far?

Shabaz: We have achieved more than 6000 downloads on the Google play store with almost no marketing involved. The reaction has been really good so far. We have got many favourable reviews. What most people appreciated the most, was the Evil mode: Disabling the snooze button.

Inc42: Right now the app is available only on the Google play store, any plans to move to the iOS platform as well?

Shabaz: Right now we are concentrating only on Android. Depending on the reaction, we will consider whether it’s worth moving to iOS as well.

Inc42: What next?

Shabaz: We are going to add more features to this app soon and also improve it, if needed based on the feedback we get from users.

Abhinay: We have other ideas in the pipeline and will release more innovative apps like this one soon.

To Download the amazing app go to:  http://tinyurl.com/walkmeup

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Inc42 Daily Brief

Stay Ahead With Daily News & Analysis on India’s Tech & Startup Economy

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