Yea but
Late spring or early summer of 2020, around the George Floyd events, my friend Elizabeth messaged me a cool idea:
“There have been reports of difficulty connecting to the internet at in-person protests. Can we make an app with helpful information, such as protest tips and bail resources, that protestors could access without an internet connection?”
Some work later, we have Protest Pal!
I shared the app on my Facebook and Instagram, and a handful of folks downloaded it :) … but meanwhile I was feeling like :(
It felt, and still feels, a bit ridiculous to think that my response to the issues surrounding civil rights and racial inequalities was to build an app.
For instance, suppose it took 32 hours of work to learn everything I needed, gather all the information, design the app, build the app, and release it. Now, suppose I spent those 32 hours working a job that pays anywhere from 10 to 60 dollars per hour and I decided to donate 10% of my earnings.
32 * .1 * 10 = 32 dollars (hours worked * donation percentage * hourly rate).
32 * .1 * 60 = 192 dollars (100% donation looks like 320 to 1,920 dollars, depending on hourly rate.)
For reference, Protest Pal generated $0, so to me it looks like the time spent on Protest Pal could have been better spent actually making money to donate.
Of course, it must be noted that the above statement assumes that economic contributions, even very small ones, provide beyond a level of benefit that a software that provides information offline would not be able to meet. However, that isn’t to say that there were no benefits from the path we took:
√ I learned more about Flutter development for Android phones
√ I built a project with several friends, memories, etc
√ Would argue that this experience was more valuable than the usual alternative of video games and hanging out (I’m writing a whole reflection, after all)
√ Got to code in Flutter 😍
√ My friend Niharika Manda taught me a masterclass in design (Using photos related to BLM, changing the colors of the buttons to reflect skin tones) and she made the app look REALLY good, the skin tone concept is such a good idea
√ Gave me something to do during the covid19 quarantine :P
√ Read a lot about civil rights movement, systemic racism, etc. I wouldn’t have read these topics by my own volition, haven’t expressed interest in the subject prior to the George Floyd event
√ The Apple store rejects apps that “could otherwise be entirely represented in a website or a web-app”
√ Doomscrolling and reading mostly negative, critical news for hours on end makes me feel existential
√ When I feel existential, I struggle to feel motivated to do anything because nothing seems worthwhile
√ And more that I can’t recall at the moment!
In retro, we should have marketed further. Thing we could have done but didn’t:
- Post on Product Hunt, Hacker News, tech + socially focused subreddits and online communities
- Shared on LinkedIn
- Physically have gone to protests and showed the app to people
- ??? Leave ideas in comments 🥺
The idea isn’t to get more users for the app but to have made the app known. What was the point of building the app and putting in a month’s worth of work if we didn’t tell anybody about it? How would people even find the app? Who on Earth does an app store search for “Protest tools”?
We also should have made the app available as a website / web-app that could be downloaded.
Apple commands a large share of the smartphone market in the United States. We failed to publish an app on the Apple app store. Who won? What was the point?
If we had made the app and its information available for download, we could have shared that link stupidly easily (Instagram: “Link in bio”) and overcome the Apple store rejection event completely.
Hindsight 20/20
It would have been nice to have known marketing techniques and ways to get exposure and attention for a product, so that we could have kept the momentum from development going into the sharing and distribution of the app itself. I don’t want to be too hard on myself — what impact would some paragraphs in an app have on racial issues that have spanned countries and generations, anyways — but oh-my-god I feel so stupid writing this, we absolutely dropped the ball.
We put all the work into releasing the software, didn’t really share it anywhere besides our personal FB and IG accounts, then carried on with our lives.
It wasn’t so much a lack of the idea of sharing, though.
Somehow, I took it personally.
I personally didn’t feel like the project itself was going to create any effect, and once we finished, it felt a bit relieving that I didn’t have to keep engaging with something that didn’t produce the feeling of potential. No disrespect to the idea or my teammates, it was just difficult for me to see meaning when I spent my time reading an incredible amount of “bad news”. Plus, seeing all the other posts and whatnot on social media made me feel like there was an abundance of BLM+protest information and support that I couldn’t meaningfully contribute to anymore…that “if I shared, I would only be contributing noise, clutter…amidst all the information already available.”
I would watch videos of protestors dressed in some serious gear, like a special operations squad, and then I would look at the code I was writing, and YIKES did I feel a bit silly. Of course, I could have gone to the protests, but I chose to stay home with respect to the pandemic.
“Someone lost an eye, wow what the heck, an eye for racial equality.”
“Someone died during the riots! This is so serious.”
“Wow, the police in some areas are cooperative and willing to listen, while other police are trying to lockdown these protestors and make aggressive moves, seemingly without prompt.”
And I would sit in my comfy couch in my cozy house on my expensive laptop writing some fucking code? I’m a university graduate and this is what I could come up with?
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I don’t have a good response to what the ideal set of actions would have been, just the mini retrospective written above. Would have been nice if we tried to reach more people in as many ways as we could have come up with, but instead I sit here feeling dumb.
Would have been nice if I could have gone through the whole experience without feeling like I wasn’t making a contribution of any meaning or value and that I was just playing pretend in the face of everything I saw others doing.
Not to say that I didn’t see any benefits or growth to myself as a person and that is a great source of value from this time. It’s just frustrating to feel that we didn’t make even a scratch or fingerprint on the problem that brought us together to build this app. Or am I so arrogant and need to check myself for thinking that we honestly could have done anything anyways, moved a needle on an issue that dates back and has remained unsolved for decades, centuries?
😒.
Thank you for reading.
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Protest Pal. A fully offline reference for protest tips with resources for bail and legal help in the Chicago area.
Available on Android.
Source code.
Protest banner from Unsplash, app icon from Protest Pal.