A common request was for business oriented apps:

I’d love to do one of those but these are harder to market and generalize. Each business is doing something different in their backend and it’s much harder to just make up something from scratch.

If there was a business app I can replicate or a backend ERP platform we can target that could be interesting but it’s very hard to teach/build something vague.

One of the things I did think about was an Intercom clone. It’s a CRM of sort. We use them for the website support and emails. I really don’t like that tool and would love to replace them. I just forgot to add it to the survey, although I don’t think it would have made an impact.

Other suggestions included:

I’m not sure I understand this comment.

Our networking does support realtime updates via: WebSockets, Sockets, Long Polling & Push. Otherwise I wouldn’t have even suggested a whatsapp clone…​

Do you mean something like socket.io or pubnub?

We have somewhat out of date support for the latter but not the former. If there is specific demand we can help with that.

Because people voted on that last year and picked it.

We try to do what people ask for. I think that even if you build completely closed backend systems a lot of your UI and code would be influenced by the top apps in the market today (e.g. Uber, Facebook, whatsapp etc.) so even if you aren’t building a social app you can learn a lot by following a course on how it’s made.

“My proposal is Bluetooth BLe, Application for sensors and anything that can help normal people with real needs“

“Apps with high hardware integration e.g. AR, Bluetooth or development boards for Embedded devices.“

Those are great but also vague. I agree we need better demos for bluetooth support but We also need mass appeal. We need concrete targets that we can implement.

One of the huge problems with bluetooth is that the standard is so big and varied. One person sees bluetooth as file sharing, while another sees it as hardware monitoring and another as a data transfer tool. Add to that the need to get physical hardware that works with this and you end up with something most people will find hard to pick up.

I started my professional career working in AI so I’d love to do some more. But moving out of my personal space, the question is what can I teach and how can I help?

I agree, I’d love to have builtin integration for things like tensorflow and other AI related API’s. I’m not sure if it’s something that should go into an app or just a small tutorial. I’d also love to integrate one of the image recognition libraries in the market.

“Most of commercial software vendors work on business apps. Not social apps. So I would love to see something resembling CRM, ERP, HCM or anything similar“

I tend to agree with that statement. The problem is that there is no real uniform standard we can target here in the app space. If you have more concrete suggestions for something we can build I’m open to it. The only thing that comes close to this is Intercom but I doubt it would have been popular in this survey.

To be fair I worked with a lot of businesses and they expect things to look like commercial apps. The app from my current bank looks like Facebook with a feed of “stories” that match my spending & stats from the bank. They even have a chat interface to a teller which should be close to whatsapp. It’s actually pretty nice.
My point is that business app developers would probably find more benefit from a tutorial on building facebook than one that’s too business specific. E.g. one could take the Uber app in a business and use it to manage their vehicle fleet.

Let developers enjoy CN1 features! Offline Build server capabilities for free!

That’s a bit unrelated but I’d like to address that as there are several common misconceptions here.

First is that offline building isn’t free. Offline building is free, the source for building Codename One is 100% open source and all the instructions are publically available. If you don’t want to make the effort to learn how to do it we have a course module that explains the steps one by one.
There is an enterprise grade offline build tool but the cost there is mostly support overhead.

Furthermore, the build servers are free to use commercially with reasonable limits. Notice that the Uber app and all our demos fall within the free quota.

The second misconception is that this would be enjoyable. It’s a pain to build offline. E.g. from our enterprise customers who can build offline (as it’s included in their subscription) a very small percentage makes use of that feature. I can build offline and I don’t use that feature.
It’s painful and surprisingly slower than using the build servers even with our enterprise integration. Even when I want to debug in an IDE I generally prefer sending a build and downloading the source code than going through the offline builder. The only reason we added that feature was for government and other cloud averse entities.

Now back to our regularly scheduled suggestions…​

We already have the restaurant app which is a shopping app of a sort in the building course.

“What’s your #1 Choice for the next App? (after the Facebook app)” is biased.. should be “What’s your #1 Choice for the next App? (after the social app)”

Damn. You are right. I’ll try to be more careful with those subtle things next time. That was unintentional.

I don’t use crypto currencies but adding something around them seems appealing. This specific app might be problematic as it’s very poorly rated with a mediocre UI. I’m open to suggestions around this field.