How Three Indian developers are using iOS capabilities to challenge the status quo

Closer to home, Apple’s thriving app developer community in India has grown by leaps and bounds. Ahead of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, we met up with developers and founders based out of India, some with a new take on ideas as old as time and others applying the hardware and strong iOS capabilities to solve pressing problems of today.

Real-time air quality monitoring in your pocket

Founded in 2016 by Namita Gupta, AirVeda started as a mother’s personal mission to find out reliable air quality data sources when her then three-year-old was diagnosed with severe childhood asthma in Delhi NCR. What started as a project with her brother Prashant by building out small air quality devices and an app to monitor and report real-time data on PM2.5, PM10, CO₂, temperature, humidity took flight when other parents started reaching out with similar needs. “Without data, it's so hard to understand what's going on - data gives you a sense of control, right? asks Namita. 

Over the years, the app has evolved to track air quality from over 9,000 stations - government as well as private stations – both real-time data and actionable insights. Fire up the app, and it tells you when you should go outside and play or when you should wear a mask outdoors – for example, it shows daily trends and will tell you that 12 to 4 p.m. is usually the best time of the day pollution wise, making it the best time to plan outdoor play time for children. The app also shows monthly and seasonal trends for vacation hotspots, so you can plan your vacation around that, and there are forecasts of air quality so that you can understand what's happening in the next few days and compare the air quality against previous years.

 Yet, one of the most loved features of the AirVeda app is its air quality widgets, which show you real-time air quality data from your nearest air quality monitor right on your phone screen without having to go into the app. The colors indicate what the air quality is, from green, yellow to red, and the app mascot Ira, who progressively gets happier or sicker based on the air quality, and you also see the environment around her, the flowers start to wilt as the air quality deteriorates. And since it consolidates data from sensors across the country, you can see a leaderboard of how your city is ranking across other cities in India as well as around the world. 

Outside of cities and readers such as yourself, the same app and sensors are also being used in rural areas where the air quality is severely impacted by wood fires, crop burning and factory pollution. Interestingly, the app even features Air Quality Champions, where individuals who care about air quality are allowed to set up air quality stations in their neighborhoods and make that available data available to other citizens in their neighborhood (while the app itself is free, the sensors are available on Flipkart, Amazon and more recently Blinkit as well). Truly democratized air quality monitoring.

Retinal diagnosis for the last mile

Headquartered in Bangalore, Remidio is an AI-enabled medical devices company that aims to deliver specialist ophthalmic diagnostic care to the last mile, outside of big city hospitals and big ophthalmologist clinic setups. Remidio’s solution combines a travel-friendly, patented optics system with their AI algorithms that leverage the CoreML platform, and the high-resolution cameras present on iPhones. Using this solution, field medical technicians can screen for diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in under 10 seconds, whether it is at a public health center in Kerala or a patient’s home in the US. 

Started by Anand Sivaraman and his team as an answer to the question – “why are ophthalmologists spending 80% of their time finding out who has a problem, when their time should be spent on treating those who have a problem” – Remidio’s goal is to deliver non-invasive tests by someone who’s not an optometrist. In the demo I witnessed, just like an optometrist shines a light into one’s eye, the optic system attached to the iPhone shaped light onto the patient’s retina for the app to take an image – all this without putting any drops to dilate the patient, and the AI automatically triggers a capture when it resolves a clear-enough image of the retina. Once the image is taken, the AI automatically runs algorithms and assesses the outcome, all without the images having to be sent to the cloud, without the need for the internet, with all the algorithms actually running on that smartphone on the edge, on the Apple CoreML framework. All while having the same clinical efficacy and standard of care as you would have with a traditional clinic setup, covering 95 to 95% of the scenarios, at a fraction of the cost - at an ophthalmologist clinic, the investment is roughly around 50 to 55 lakhs, whereas the Remidio setup is roughly around 9 to 10 lakhs. In speaking to the team, we learned that the platform has screened over 15 million patients across 40 countries so far. It has integration into public health initiatives, transforming maternal and child health programs.

What’s even more interesting is that the research thus far has shown significant promise to be extended to systemic diseases like cardiovascular risk as well. The typical issue today is that the healthcare system is grouped and when you head into a hospital to get a cardiovascular risk assessment or a chronic kidney disease or an eyecare screening, you need different sets of devices. The team at Remidio ask – can a single device do all of this, and can it do so non-invasively? 

Ludo by Gameberry Labs: Social Play

“Why another Ludo? " is the first question we had when we first tried out the Ludo by Gameberry, a Bangalore-based bootstrapped gaming company co-founded by Afsar Ahmad. Interestingly, the Ludo Gameberry built was originally for India, but it grew outside India to a point where it actually became a bigger market for Gameberry – today, 99% of their active users are actually outside India. Gameberry’s Ludo started back in 2017, when there was a huge demand for playing Ludo live in India, courtesy the phenomenon we all know as the rise of Jio. It set itself apart by being the first to offer four player experiences or team versus team experiences – the digitally connected social experience, that is. Over time, the team has added more features over and above the core Ludo experience – quests players can complete, interesting dice, frames, boards and avatars that people can buy and collect, and more.

One really interesting monetization move used by Gameberry in Ludo, one that people buy the most, is the ability to re-roll in their game. Essentially, it’s the ability to re-roll your dice if you don’t like the number, and this is allowed in a limited quantity for the player because you don't want to interfere entirely with the luck element of the game. Team Gameberry have noticed this is a major monetization lever for the game - people want to have control of their destiny, they want to tweak it a little bit whenever they feel there's an urgent need for it.

Yet, the core strength in Gameberry’s Ludo was how you could, as in our childhood, play with friends and family, and banter alongside the play, like when you cut a token and then tease the other person. Interestingly, the two-versus-two feature that was introduced saw huge uptake from the most unlikely of quarters - people who were in a relationship – who wanted to play together as a team versus other people who were also in a relationship.

Gameberry offers the classic board game Ludo Star & a similar Spanish game, Parchisi Star, reimagining classic games on mobile with a social experience that helped friends and family connect, even if they were kilometers apart from each other. The games have been a runway hit with 25 million monthly active users and half a million concurrent players.

Tushar Kanwar is a tech columnist and commentator, and tweets @2shar.