OurFlat Household & Chores - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

Before releasing OurFlat in 2021, my business partner and I have had multiple working student jobs and practical projects at university. Personally, I started developing apps and web applications from the age of 14 and have released a few since then. However, OurFlat was our first Flutter project.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

To be honest, the most challenging aspects of our journey to a released app were the non-technical parts. Everything from legal requirements and In-App-Purchases setup (incl. pricing strategies). On the technical side, we spent a lot of time and effort on state management in Flutter, which is time well spent, I believe.

_{Felix Gabler}

The interviewee, Felix Gabler, is the Co-Founder and CEO of OurFlat - the ultimate app for rewarding and enjoyable shared living.

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

Duolingo: Beautiful and playful interface and animations, have not come across a bug yet, and they use inspiring retention rate driving approaches
Disney+: High-quality user interface, I worked with many mobile video players and know it can be quite painful, so I respect their work
Sleep As Android: Have been using this app for a very long time and they continuously bring out updates with awesome functionality and cutting-edge designs

How long have you been working on this app?

We started working on our app in December of 2019, took a hiatus from March 2020 to August 2020 and then finally released the first version in November 2020. Much of the work was part time and we were only two people. However, we have now spent a total of around 2700 hours on this project.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

We had been living together as roommates for a while and also lived in other shared households before.

We know first-hand how frustrating it can be to constantly have to request roommates to do their chores or buying groceries too often because the paper shopping list was not up to date.

When we saw that most existing apps for shopping lists, chore planning, and finances management were either unintuitive or lacked features (e.g., many do not have offline capabilities), we realized that we needed to create a new solution that offers everything a shared household needs in an intuitive, easy-to-use app.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

It is more intuitive, more feature-rich, and more stable than all the solutions we tried before embarking on our journey of creating our own. To me, it's the little things that make it such a joy to use.

An example is the "reserve" feature in the shopping list that enabled incredibly efficient roommate shopping trips.

Another would be the ability to have multiple flats, which is awesome for splitting expenses on holiday trips with friends. Then there are also group polls in the chat, quick adding of a finance entry after shopping, and much more.

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

For 2023, we want to focus on the most used parts of our app: shopping list, chores, and finances. Some of the upcoming features will be the ability to have multiple shopping lists for different stores or a subgroup of roommates, better filtering for all the lists, smarter shopping list suggestions, recurring finance entries, and much more.

We're also planning to overhaul the chat and make it more advanced with everything one expects from a modern chat solution.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

Give OurFlat a spin and share it with your friends and family. You'll see how much more harmonious shared living can be when things are smoothly organized. And on top of that, by sharing the app, you can also unlock OurFlat Pro with even more awesome features!