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Ask HN: How to proceed with smartphone ideas that are too low-level to be apps?
I have a few ideas on how to enhance the UI/UX of smartphones, but most of them are too low-level to be made into apps.
To get an idea of the sort of things I'm thinking about, take a feature that is now in many phones: personalized ringtones for different people in your address book. The first person who had that idea could not turn it into an app, since almost no phone I know of gives access to such low-level API to developers (i.e. trigger event when phone call comes in, inform the app of the number calling, and allow overriding the default ringtone)
These things are quite straightforward for the device/OS makers (iPhone, Android, etc) to implement but that functionality is not usually exposed in the public API.
So, given an idea like the above, is there a way to capitalize on it?
For example, one could:
a) Patent the idea and wait, hoping that some company will one day implement it.
b) Patent the idea and approach companies to add to their mobile device / OS
c) Other?
Any thoughts? Are such things even patentable (e.g. the personalized ringtone mentioned above) ? Any other ways to capitalize on these sorts of ideas?
- byoung2 16y agoAndroid and Windows Mobile give you very liberal access to low-level functionality of the OS. Windows Mobile in particular, despite all its faults, is a very flexible OS as far as what developers can do. For example, there is an app on Windows Mobile that intercepts incoming calls and does a web lookup on the phone number to display the name, address, age, and known associates of the caller. You could likely do anything you can think of with one of those, and use that as leverage to get other companies to allow you access to their OS's.