SineKazan

About the app

SineKazan was the first app I ever shipped to an app store, and looking back it was far too ambitious for a first app. Cinema sat at its centre: TV and movie discovery, what's in theatres, lists and a newsletter. But it didn't stop there.

Behind the discovery side ran a recommendation algorithm I wrote myself. It took what a user had watched, rated and added to their lists, and suggested shows, films and lists tailored to them. The most important thing I learned here was the cold start problem: what do you recommend to a new user you know nothing about? I built something that blended overall popularity with personalisation; the more a user interacted, the more personal the recommendations became.

On top of that came 28 games: purely-for-fun ones, prize games tied to shows and films, online and offline ones, and live trivia nights like Quiz Nights. Points won in games could be spent in the in-app virtual store. Making earning and spending pass through a single accounting flow, and keeping it closed to abuse, was one of the hardest problems I tackled at that age.

There were also talent contests — short film, song, cosplay, screenplay. Entrants' submissions were rated, commented on and liked by the community. Voting being open to manipulation was a practical problem here, not a theoretical one; when there's a prize on the line, people push at the system.

Alongside all of that were twenty separate community platforms: a TV and film review platform, an anonymous venting platform, an in-app social feed, a blog publishing platform, live streaming and a newsletter. In other words, dozens of independent subsystems inside a single app.

After a while I pulled the app from the stores. The reason wasn't technical: I was 18 and didn't have the knowledge or experience to run a community at that scale — moderation, prize distribution, user support, content review. This was where I first learned that writing the code and keeping a product alive are two different things; that's why I keep the scope much narrower in the apps I've built since.