PINShield mobile application for Android and iPhone developed by Springfeed Consultancy.

PINShield helps you store your pin codes in a safe and user friendly way, wrapped in an exclusive design. PINShield stores and protects your codes through a visual grid representation.

PINShield is based on safety. For this reason, the codes are only stored on your smartphone and not ‘somewhere in the cloud'. The app works offline. This increases the usability as PINShield does not require Internet access and is usable anywhere, anytime.

For this release PINShield is developed for iPhone and Android. In the future, a version for Windows Phone will be released.

PINShield has an accessible guide that helps you to get started. The guide adjusts to wherever you are in the app. Thereby, you will get the needed help depending on which page you are at.

To get started, you type your pin code into colored squares in a pattern you can remember. PINShield stores the complete grid representation but has no knowledge of the placement of your numeric code. Your code is hidden in the grid and only you will be able to decipher it. This protects your code from theft both in the real and virtual world.

See PINShield video tutorial:

PINShield is published and translated into Danish, English, French, Spanish and German.

PINShield consists, technically speaking, of an already known mobile technology. Whereas design and safety to benefit consumers have been first priority.

Read more and download at pinshield.com.

Imagine this: You release a new mobile application, and a lot of happy and satisfied users start pouring in immediately. They want new updates and extra features, they are even willing to pay for it! They say it is a huge success. The demand grows and the phone keeps ringing. You are confused. All you wanted was to create an app that no one would ever discover…

But do not worry. Here are 10 tips to avoid more customers, so you can have your app all by yourself.

1. Hide your app

   Name your app something unrecognisable which sounds like every other app. This ensures that when the users search for your app, a thousand of results will appear, and your app will be difficult to find among them. Another trick is to name your app something that is really hard to spell.

2. Only give access to few

   Users tend to tell their friends and family about the apps they download. But if friends and family do not have the same phone as the user, they cannot download the app, i.e. the app is only released for iPhone and friends and family have BlackBerry, Nokia and HTC phones! By developing for as few mobile platforms and screen sizes as possible, only few users will have access to your app.

3. Lots of features

   From the very beginning, your application should be filled up with as many features as possible. Thereby the user will have a hard time navigating it, will lose track and never realise the purpose of the app. This also enhances the complexity and the chance of errors.

4. Design is irrelevant

   Do not use professional graphics designers. Nice graphics will just help increase the reliability and improve the user interface, which many users will enjoy. So if you wish to avoid that, you should only focus on functionality and not design.

5. Make it difficult to use

   Violate as many design principles as possible for the chosen mobile platform. Why use built-in design elements when you can create your own?! If users cannot recognise the design, because it looks different than the rest of the phone, they will have difficulties understanding how the app works.

6. No Social Media!

   Make sure that the users cannot ‘spread the word’ about your application via other medias such as Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and SMS. Allowing this may potentially result in an increase in user uptake due to the viral spreading.

7. Do not listen to what users are saying!

   Do not follow up on users’ reviews and comments on various app stores. If you listen to what they say, you may end up with an improved product and satisfied customers.

8. Use lots of battery power

   Make programming errors and drain the battery so the user’s phone easily runs out of power. Then the user will be annoyed by the app and will probably never use it again. And in the end the user will probably uninstall the app.

9. Generate bottlenecks

   If you have an app, which delivers data from a server, then make sure that it does not ’scale’. At a certain point, the server will be overloaded because of all the users. This will slow down the performance, and users will probably get tired and bored of waiting.

10. Hush

    Be secretive about your app and its services. Do not publish anything about your app on your website or elsewhere. If you have a mobile website, then you should not make a direct link to the various app stores so users can easily download your app.

If you follow these 10 tips carefully, there is a good chance you can prevent users from pouring in… On the other hand, if you wish to have more users, you should simply do the opposite of the advices above.

At Springfeed our experience is, that our customers do care about quality and getting as many users as possible, which is a great benefit for the end users. The 10 tips above are therefore meant as a humorous way of emphasising the importance of using resources in the right places to ensure an optimal user uptake.