STUDENTS at Cairo University have developed TREE, an innovative way to teach young people how to develop mobile applications, reports Nada Deyaa. This year alone, TREE is responsible for the creation of three Android mobile applications that can be downloaded from Google Play. Reco, Outs and FamSpot are the applications created by students who received training using TREE. Each of the “apps” has its own market segment and target audience. Reco helps young people fill their free time with recommendations from friends. Shaymaa Haleem, a member of the creative team, said that the app was designed to fight boredom by allowing young people to recommend products and activities to each other. “Reco can be a good way of finding out the best movie to watch, for example,” she said. Outs is an app that helps users decide where to go out, even on a limited budget. The app allows users to decide on venues according to cost and other criteria, and will also recommend places. FamSpot helps talented, but as yet unknown, individuals market themselves, and it includes spaces for ratings and comments by other users. The idea is for “every talented person to take his place in the spotlight,” the team developing the app said. The three applications will be added to the over 675,000 other apps now available on Google Play, where apps have bee downloaded more than 25 billion times. By the end of 2014, it is expected that there will be some one billion Android users, far more than the estimated 344 million using the Apple operating system. The writer is a freelance journalist.
