Dev Story: "Lack of competition in bada apps is an advantage"

Successful software companies have to be founded by teenagers; at least that is what history teaches us. Tomislav Car, founder of Croatian app development company Infinum, stuck to that rule, when he created the company over 6 years ago. Creating Apps talked to him about the early days, their open source library ToApp, what he thinks about computer studies and why bada apps have a great advantage over iOS or Android.

Infinum is what is considered an old stager in the app business, with the company being founded “way back” in 2005. Tomislav Car and his Co-Founder Matej Špoler were 18 years old at that time. “We developed a mobile application for Java feature phones that could display city map,” explains Tomislav. “That was rather revolutionary then. We managed to sell our first license to a company in Malaysia for 5000 Dollar. This was incidentally just the right amount of money to start a company in Croatia, so we did.”

Unknown: "We never had a boss ourselves"

Unlike most others who find a job at a large company first before starting their own business, Tomislav and Matej have never been employed.  “We completely skipped that step, so we don’t know what it is like to have a boss”, smirks Tomislav, overseeing a team of 10 people supported by one or two freelancers at peak times. The company has two offices, in Zagreb and Karlovac.

Tomislav Car, Founder of the Croatian app development company Infinum

Universities: More emphasis on actual programming & design needed

Similar like his competitors, Tomislav usually takes young people right out of college and trains them on mobile development. “There are computer science studies at the university, but the graduates are trained in computer science, not actual software development work. They rarely have done some actual work, like building a mobile app, and almost never worked on a project in the course of some longer time, let's say one year, maintained it and received customer feedback.”

According to Tomislav, who says his company feels strongly about design and UI, the computer science colleges also do not put enough or no emphasis at all on design topics.

Usefull: ToApp redirects website vistors to fitting app

When it comes to programming, Infinum follows the general trend to use open source whenever possible, and also offers some of their own libraries to the public. “Some libraries we use in our day to day work are available on our github account, such as ToApp for examples. It is quite useful for all app developers, as it easily redirects users visiting your site with and iPhone/Android to the appropriate app store to download your app,“ explains Tomislav.

The idea is as simple as brilliant. If you integrate ToApp to your website, first-time-visitors will be shown a pop-up saying  “This website has a mobile application. Would you like to install it?” If the visitor clicks yes, she or he is automatically redirected to the appropriate application store. If not, nothing happens and the visitor is not bothered again, since the answer is saved in the cookies.

Unfulfilled: The dream of a good cross platform dev technology

Aside from that, Infinum mainly produces apps for iPhone, Android, Symbian and Qt. A good cross-platform development technology would be something developers hope to find, Tomislav explains when being asked about future trends in app development. “So we assume that one of the trends will definitely be mobile web apps”, he concludes.


One of the projects Infinum is proud of: badaSports

USP: bada apps

Right now, they still produce Jave ME apps – and apps for Samsung’s bada. Although bada does not have a large market share in Croatia, the system is quite interesting for them on a worldwide scale: “That is due to the lack of competition. You compete with fewer developers and with much less apps as opposed to the App Store or Android Market for instance”, Tomislav elaborates. Most money is made with other platforms, but the Samsung system is an interesting niche, he states.

Unafraid: Physical efforts to improve apps

So, although they had other successful apps, such as the one for the Croatia Car Club (HAK), which was ranked number 1 in the local App Store for a couple of weeks, one of their most successful apps was a bada app:

badaSports helps to track one’s sports activities and share them with friends or training partners. The app won a 100,000 US-Dollar price on the Samsung Mobile Developer Challenge in 2010. “And it’s a good example to show how much passion we put in our apps”, Tomislav explains smilingly, “Matej even crashed with his bike, because he wanted to test the GPS tracking functionality on the move himself.”


See also:
Dev Story: "Nokia will bring reach & devices - Microsoft the tools"
Dev story: Offshoring boosts Belarusian app biz, says Itransition
Dev Story: Bus to success - Dmitry Pogrebitsky
Dev Story: Strelovod expanding abroad