"There's an app for that" was a statement that Apple trademarked in 2009 as they began the rollout for the iPhone 3G. Today, that declaration is very true. 
 
 Weather trackers, travel planners and dating apps are just a small selection of the applications available. They cover every possible demographic and audience in order to cater to their various needs. 
 
 Despite that, the multitude of programs has made it difficult for aspiring developers to come up with the newest creation. 
 
 It seems as if every possible aspect is covered but Ryan Matzner, Director & Chief Strategist of Fueled has some advice. 
 
 Based in New York City, Fueled is a mobile app development company that helps people build apps for the iPhone, Android, iPad and the desktop PC. Matzner polled his staff and clients to come up with this list of tips of what's hot/what's not in today's app world. 
 
 General Terrible 
 
 Selling public parking spaces (Airbnb for public parking!): "It turns out no one wants to go through the hassle of setting up and monitoring a bidding platform for a parking space and spend 10-20 minutes hanging out in a spot just to collect a few dollars (or less)." 
 
 (Airbnb for public parking!): "It turns out no one wants to go through the hassle of setting up and monitoring a bidding platform for a parking space and spend 10-20 minutes hanging out in a spot just to collect a few dollars (or less)." Tinder for dogs . Here's the message that we were sent via our website: "I need a proposal today for LillyFly. Sorry for the last minute. But I'm meeting with some investors this weekend. LillyFly is going to be an IOS APP (Identical) to Tinder. Except with Dogs. Purpose. So Dogs/Owners can have MeetUps at the local dog park. Can you guys email me a proposal today???" 
 
 . Here's the message that we were sent via our website: "I need a proposal today for LillyFly. Sorry for the last minute. But I'm meeting with some investors this weekend. LillyFly is going to be an IOS APP (Identical) to Tinder. Except with Dogs. Purpose. So Dogs/Owners can have MeetUps at the local dog park. Can you guys email me a proposal today???" GPS-based chat . "This idea comes in every month or two. It's a system of chatting with people around you. We spent about a month pondering the idea with WunWun's founder Lee Hnetinka, back in 2011 when he was working on Bubble. We both ultimately concluded that the idea wasn't going anywhere. People just don't care much about connecting with people over chat just because they're in a similar physical location. Just look at the failure of all the geo-networking apps that were so hot at SXSW 2012 and ultimately fell flat. Or look at Meet Gatsby, which also completely failed (though, ironically, Rameet and I originally met through it, which is probably the one successful match the app ever had)." 
 
 . "This idea comes in every month or two. It's a system of chatting with people around you. We spent about a month pondering the idea with WunWun's founder Lee Hnetinka, back in 2011 when he was working on Bubble. We both ultimately concluded that the idea wasn't going anywhere. People just don't care much about connecting with people over chat just because they're in a similar physical location. Just look at the failure of all the geo-networking apps that were so hot at SXSW 2012 and ultimately fell flat. Or look at Meet Gatsby, which also completely failed (though, ironically, Rameet and I originally met through it, which is probably the one successful match the app ever had)." Pee Break ; "App that lets you know when your friends are going to the bathroom. Stepping out of the movie theater or off the dance floor for a pee-break, and it's too loud (or quiet) to tell ask your girlfriends to join you? There's an app for that!" 
 
 ; "App that lets you know when your friends are going to the bathroom. Stepping out of the movie theater or off the dance floor for a pee-break, and it's too loud (or quiet) to tell ask your girlfriends to join you? There's an app for that!" Shock Therapy: "App that shocks you when you haven't been moving your bod enough. The idea was pitched as an app that would communicate with an external device: a shock bracelet that can send electrical currency through your skin, hair, or muscles. Haven't stepped away from your desk in the past 30 minutes? ZING! Eating unhealthy? ZING!" 
 
 Terrible To People Who Understand Tech 
 
 Apps to find bars with happy hour deals : "Get in line." 
 
 : "Get in line." Emojis of all types (ratchet emojis, college life emojis, celebrity emojis). "The emojis on an iPhone exist the same way any other international language does on the phone. They're really just characters on the phone, like any letter or symbol on the keyboard. They're built into iOS, so you can't just create new ones and add them to the phone. People don't seem to realize this and we get about one call a week asking for a quote to build an emoji app. People get confused because there are many emoji apps in the app store, but what they don't realize is that all these apps are just reusing the fixed set of emoji on the Apple keyboard. This concept hits a real sweet-spot with would-be million-dollar-idea-havers: it's a simple technical concept, people are familiar with it, and there is a clear need for new emojis as the current set is overly limited." 
 
 (ratchet emojis, college life emojis, celebrity emojis). "The emojis on an iPhone exist the same way any other international language does on the phone. They're really just characters on the phone, like any letter or symbol on the keyboard. They're built into iOS, so you can't just create new ones and add them to the phone. People don't seem to realize this and we get about one call a week asking for a quote to build an emoji app. People get confused because there are many emoji apps in the app store, but what they don't realize is that all these apps are just reusing the fixed set of emoji on the Apple keyboard. This concept hits a real sweet-spot with would-be million-dollar-idea-havers: it's a simple technical concept, people are familiar with it, and there is a clear need for new emojis as the current set is overly limited." Building a point-of-sale (POS) cash register system: "This is a HUGE undertaking that requires a huge sales force to execute, on top of it. And the payoff has very limited potential." 
 
 "This is a HUGE undertaking that requires a huge sales force to execute, on top of it. And the payoff has very limited potential." Any app that requires a huge network of users and can't work "with the inevitably smaller set of initial users" that it will have. 
 
 Apps that allows you to pay when you walk out of a store : "Sometimes a super smart idea, like this one, can be really dumb. Lots of wannabe entrepreneurs have no concept of how current technology works." 
 
 : "Sometimes a super smart idea, like this one, can be really dumb. Lots of wannabe entrepreneurs have no concept of how current technology works." A daily scavenger hunt: "Every day the app will post an assignment and then users will take and upload pictures in hops of winning a prize or coupon. Meh." 
 
 Other Terrible Things People Call Fueled About 
 
 People trying to sell their ideas : "On a regular basis, people call us up and tell us they have million-dollar or billion-dollar ideas that they have no interest or means to pursue and want to sell the idea to us. We quickly hang up on these calls." 
 
 : "On a regular basis, people call us up and tell us they have million-dollar or billion-dollar ideas that they have no interest or means to pursue and want to sell the idea to us. We quickly hang up on these calls." "People call us every day with a ridiculous budgets to build huge apps. For example, yesterday a guy called wanting to build a new social network that would cost around $200,000 to develop and then had a budget of only $1,500. -- People hear about Internet startups and founders striking it right with a hot new website. They assume these things are trivial to build and can easily be built overnight, if only someone could come up with the right idea first." ||||| PetMatch 
 
 I don't want to diminish the death of your beloved kitty or pooch. 
 
 I just want to diminish the effects. 
 
 I know that losing your pet can be very painful, but this is a world in which cloning is au courant and apps exist to make your life more complete. 
 
 So let's put those two as close together as we can. What we come up with is PetMatch. 
 
 This thoughtful app seeks to find you a pet that looks just like the last one you had before it died of old age, ran away to Zurich, or was run over by a careless tyke on a bike. 
 
 All you have to do is upload a picture of your loved and lost one. Then the very clever technology from parent company Superfish does the rest. 
 
 Superfish claims: "Our sophisticated algorithms (and our registered patents) allow us to analyze every picture and provide similar and near identical images in real time -- no text tags, no human involvement." 
 
 The lovely thing about its PetMatch is that it takes your photo and tries to match it with images of cats and dogs in your area (and beyond) that are up for adoption. 
 
 Once a match is found, PetMatch passes the details on to you and you can find a new but very familiar friend. 
 
 There are, though, some practicalities. Pets have characters. What if you almost identical new pet has an entirely different character from your last? Won't that seem like your last cat or dog had come out of very difficult surgery that wasn't entirely successful? 
 
 On the positive side, though, you can just enter an image of your ideal cat or dog and see if, somehow, the app can bring up a match. 
 
 TechCrunch tells me that Superfish is populated by very clever Stanford and MIT PhD types, whose ambitions are great. Their next ventures are visual search apps for jewelry and furniture. 
 
 However, given the joy that PetMatch can bring, surely the next logical step would be LoverMatch. 
 
 Yes, she might have left you because she didn't realize quite how wonderful you are. But imagine if LoverMatch could find you someone who looked just like her, but appreciated you far, far more. And was, thanks to the myriad dating sites around available. (Or at least apparently available.) 
 
 It is said, by both men and women, that they have a type. So wouldn't it save so much time, effort, pain, and expensive dinners in pretentious restaurants for an app to help you find precisely the physical specimen you need to make your life truly whole? 
 
 Wouldn't it at least perform something of an automatic sifting process, without you having to do too much work? 
 
 Then, just as with the pet-adopters, you'd have to hope for a little character to go along with the looks. 
 
 I suppose there's only one drawback with this idea. No one on dating sites looks remotely like their picture. 
 
 PetMatch ||||| Really? It’s only September. (Cuddlr) 
 
 Scrolling around Charlie Williams’s new app, Cuddlr — proudly billed as the “Tinder for cuddling” — you get the sense that maybe Williams hasn’t spent a whole lot of time online. 
 
 The app, which promises to connect consenting adults for safe, fun, nonsexual snuggling, relies on the same geolocation technology as Tinder, Grindr and their ilk. It also relies on the same core philosophy: That, given the opportunity, people will use their phones to make connections with each other — in this case, unsexy, platonic connections that just so happen to involve lots of physical touch. 
 
 That’s kind of where Cuddlr falls on its face. Call it the app equivalent of the popular Internet axiom, Rule 34: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” It doesn’t matter how much Cuddlr insists the app is for free hugs only — in its seven days in the App Store, it’s already turned to distinctly less PG purposes. 
 
 Consider the number of requests sent in the witching hours after 11 p.m. Or the fact that, despite much trying, the Daily Dot’s EJ Dickson could not find a single other lady to hug earlier this week. Or the fact that every Cuddlr user I messaged for this story was in bed, asked for my picture, or both. 
 
 
 
 Cuddlr notifications: curiously frequent after dark! 
 
 When I finally found a suitable cuddle this morning — young guy, normal picture, just a couple neighborhoods away — we exchanged a series of texts negotiating (what I thought would be) a friendly hug. When he asked to see my picture, I sent him a picture with my boyfriend. He was, well … disappointed. 
 
 “I’m into the idea of spontaneous, no-strings-attached sex,” he texted back. 
 
 So that didn’t work out. 
 
 American society has a complicated, and kind of bizarre, relationship with interpersonal touch: It’s expected between sexual partners and family members, but takes on a distinctly creepy connotation between just about anyone else. Williams points out, in his impassioned raison d’etre on Medium, that mainstream America finds it more acceptable to use an app to meet a stranger for sex than to use an app to find a friendly hug. Since hugs are good for you, and carry little inherent risk, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. 
 
 It also echoes an argument made by the “cuddle party” gurus of the early aughts: “We live in a very touch-deprived society,” the self-proclaimed sex coach Reid Mihalko once said. 
 
 But there’s a reason cuddle parties aren’t in vogue today, just as there’s a reason that every Cuddlr user I corresponded with for this story asked to see my picture. Americans simply aren’t conditioned to think of something as physically intimate as “cuddling” in a non-sexual or non-romantic way. (Heck, it’s in the very definition of the word.) 
 
 And while Williams’s quest to change their minds on that score is admirable — visionary, even — a geolocation app is self-evidently not the way to do it. People will use a geolocation app for sex, full-stop. And no amount of small print or cautionary help text will change that. 
 
 In fact, given the way people already appear to be using the app, the small print almost seems dangerous: with its vague intimation that “a cuddle can be many things” and its refusal to ban users even after someone else flags their cuddle as “inappropriate” — multiple users must make such reports — it’s easy to see cuddlers meeting up with different expectations. (It’s also easy to see lawsuits. Or sexual assaults.) 
 
 This is a bit of a tragedy, really, because geolocation — with its unprecedented ability to connect nearby strangers — has so much (platonic!) social potential. I would love an app that could help me meet my neighbors in my apartment building, whom I very rarely see. Or other dog-owners in my area. 
 
 Frankly, I would even like an app that connected people who like hugs — literal hugs, and nothing else — because I do think that’s kind of a charming idea. I hugged one of my co-workers this morning after spotting him on Cuddlr. It was nice! 
 
 
 
 The screen that pops up when you accept a cuddle-request; this one came from my coworker. Thanks for the hug, Michael! (Cuddlr) 
 
 But the problem with designing an app around that type of very fundamental social interaction, I think, is that because the interaction is so extremely basic — a hug, or a “hi,” or a “hey, you live here too?” — it also strikes us as something that shouldn’t require technology. Something only the truly pathetic would do with the aid of an app. 
 
 I’m reminded of the protagonist in the movie Her, resignedly writing other people’s love letters — a profession invented by Spike Jonze to show exactly how disconnected modern technology has made us. We’re fine outsourcing a range of personal labors to tech, from laundry to listening, but writing a letter is so easy, so uncomplicated, that it seems to fail some critical test. Whereas modern dating/mating is a logistical nightmare — where to meet people? how to gauge interest? how to wade through the cascade of unavailable, unattractive and otherwise ineligible candidates to find the needle-in-the-haystack for you? — finding a hug is pretty easy. (Unless you have no friends, no family, and no affectionate acquaintances … which brings us back to that core idea that only the socially destitute would rely on such an app.) 
 
 It would be nice if our society, and our brains, weren’t wired that way, of course. But while they are, Cuddlr simply isn’t going to see the type of adoption as, say, online dating sites or apps, which 2 in 5 American singles use. Williams is right: Despite the profound popularity of tech-mediated socialization, and the integration of geolocation into most aspects of our technological lives, it’s far more acceptable to use an app to find sex than it is to find just about any other “connection.” Even when the app states, explicitly, that it involves connection of a purely nonsexual kind. 
 
 Caveat cuddler: Despite our best efforts, it’s not exactly warm and fuzzy out there.
– Dating for dogs? An app to time pee breaks? Among the multitudes of clever mobile apps come plenty that are duds from the start. Developer Fueled shares some of the most ridiculous pitches it has received, via Business Insider: Shock treatment: Linked to an electric bracelet, this app is all about self-punishment. It would help you out by shocking you when you're doing something unhealthy—for instance, spending too much time sitting at your desk without moving around. Communal urination: If you want buddies in the bathroom, this is for you. The app would inform your friends that you're planning a trip to pee; it would, theoretically, be handy when you can't tell them yourself because you're in a club or a movie theater. Parking-spot dealer: This would apparently be a combination of eBay and airBnB—for public parking. Users would have to hold a spot as others bid on it, and the pay would be meager. A dog-dating app: From the message Fueled received, it's unclear whether this involves dating other dog owners, or just dogs dating dogs. The pitch: "an iOS APP (Identical) to Tinder. Except with Dogs. Purpose. So Dogs/Owners can have MeetUps at the local dog park." Click for the full list.