In London, you got lost, and due to expensive roaming, you don’t want to turn on the internet? Croatian students have invented the perfect application for you – BackWay. It will guide you to your starting destination without turning on the internet. Behind the project are Božidar Ševo, a student of the Faculty of Science and Mathematics, and Alma Šavar, a design student at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb.
BackWay is special in that you do not need to be connected to the internet or download maps beforehand; it remembers the route itself. The development process was not too complicated as Ševo already has experience in app development.
– This was not my first application, so the development was not overly complicated. Most of the time was spent testing outside to see if the application shows the correct direction and distance. We worked on it during the student competition AppStartContest last year, so it lasted about three months. Of course, we didn’t do it all day as we had other obligations like studying, etc. – he told us.
Now their main focus is on developing a custom application, primarily for banks, tourist boards, festivals, and similar entities where users receive all the main locations and functionalities in the app. It is also possible to add an event schedule. Feedback is good, and they have a maximum of five stars in the App Store.
– People like that it is simple and works offline. One of the main problems is that it is very difficult to acquire users for location-based applications because there are quite a few similar apps. Many, when they hear about BackWay, remember situations when they were in a city without internet access and needed to return to their hotel. At that moment, they had to spend a lot of money on roaming to check Google Maps to see where they were and how to get back. People really like the app and actively use it – he emphasized.
The goal is to further develop the application, and they financed the project themselves. They received support from the Zagreb Entrepreneurial Incubator. The space they work in was free for them, and the advantage of such work was communication with other teams and the ability to find solutions to some of their problems.
Patching holes Also, a successful application that has five stars is the student project Squee. The idea for the application was presented to us by one of its creators, Ivan Ivanković.
– The idea for the application came spontaneously. Ivan Kapulica, Krunoslav Klarić, and I have been good friends since childhood. We went through elementary school, high school, and university together. We constantly hung out and thought about what we could do, and we started various projects. The idea came when we realized that there is no single place in the world where high-end gadgets developed by independent manufacturers can be purchased. We started with the goal of creating a marketplace that would revolutionize the fragmented world of gadgets, just as Apple did in the software world. Later, our idea changed and evolved. The team currently consists of six people, three of whom are economists, one designer, and two programmers – says Ivan Ivanković.
