A list of sample Web App Ideas

Every time I start a tutorial I find myself in a limbo wondering which app should I build. A to-do app? Not again!

If you’re reading this post you are looking for an idea, a simple app that you can use in your tutorial or in your example project to test a new framework or API, but you can’t find anything that really resonates with you.

It needs to be simple enough but at the same time complex enough to be worth doing.

“I don’t want to build another to-do app”, I hear you thinking.

I wrote this post to help myself, and I hope this will help you as well.

Some of the ideas are self-contained (not involving the use of an external API), some make use of famous public APIs where you can easily grab pre-built data.

Some require a server part, some do not, which might also depend on your implementation.

But I try to keep those ideas:

good to build a tutorial
good to experiment with web technologies
not something that will take a week to figure out
not “startup ideas”
I do not target mobile apps but web apps
easy to explain
easy to build (less than 24 hours if prepared)
easy to extend with new features

So, enough talk, here’s the list!

Simple apps
API-powered apps
Data for your sample apps
Wrapping up

Simple apps

A weight tracker app

It accepts a set of manual entries of weight measurements taken at different dates
It can plot a graph
It can allow to track multiple entities, for example more than one person weight
Store them somewhere

A calculator app

A standard calculator: numbers, +, -, *, /, and the result

See video tutorial

A book database

Enter the books you own
Enter the books you’d like to buy
Store the book info, images

A recipes app

Enter a name, a description with the steps
Have pictures
Have some ranking for difficulty and quality
Add the time needed
Have different steps with a picture for each
Store them somewhere

See video tutorial

A bill tracker

Log bills, amounts and date
List bills
Have a few graphs (this year / last year)
Store them somewhere

An expenses tracker

Log expenses, tag them (or have categories)
List expenses
Have a few graphs (last month / last year)
Store them somewhere

A chat application

Some sort of stripped-down Slack
People enter without authentication and are assigned a name, stored for when they come back
Store the history
Add notifications

A notes app

Add a new note
List all your notes in the sidebar
Store them somewhere

A personal diary app

Add entries with a date and text
Entries have a date
Show more recent first
Attach pictures
Store them somewhere

A pomodoro app

Enter a time
Start timer
Alert when the time is over

See video tutorial

A meme generator

Have 10 popular meme images
Let the user add the text
Result is image + text
Store the history

Tic-tac-toe game

We all know what a tic-tac-toe game is 🙂

See video tutorial

The game of life

A great project involving math and graphics.

See video tutorial

A blog engine

Allow to login and add posts
Visitors can add comments
Store the data somewhere

A QA engine

Allow to login
Allow to add questions
Allow to answer to questions
Allow original user to choose the best question
Store the data somewhere

A forum engine

Allow to login
Allow to add posts
Allow to comment on posts
Store the data somewhere

An embeddable live chat

Think Intercom or Olark.

Have a “backend” where you respond
Embed on a web page
Let people write to you privately

API-powered apps

A Hacker News client

List the popular posts
Show a post comments
Show a user profile
Search HN

Check HNPWA and Awesome Hacker News for inspiration

A Reddit client

List the popular posts
List the comments of a post
Show a user profile

An Instagram client

Enter an hashtag and get the latest posts
Enter a username and get the latest posts
Allow to store one or more hashtags/usernames and get all the latest posts from those

A GitHub API client

List the popular repositories from today / week / month
List the latest commits in a repository
Show a person or organization public repositories ranked by stars

An Unsplash API client

Search images by topic
Let the user enter a term, show relevant images

Start at Unsplash API

Data for your sample apps

Sometimes you start doing some simple app, but you’re bored at finding data you can use. You don’t have to, you can use real data, or random data.

Public APIs you can use in example projects

Maybe you have an idea for a perfectly nice CRUD app, or something that works with an API, but you don’t want to create the API in the first place.

I recommend to check out Airtable, which provides a great API for developers, very easy to use, like a database.

There are amazing public APIs you can use:

Image placeholders for your sample projects

Image generators

Avatars:

Sample text generator for your sample projects

Lorem Ipsum is boring. Spice it up:

If you insist on using Lorem Ipsum, Loripsum is a good generator.

Other fake data

FakeJSON has tons of fake data generation capabilities.

JSONPlaceholder has fake posts, comments, photos, todos, users, albums ready for REST consumption.

Need fake name/user data generation? Check UI Names and RandomUser

Wrapping up

I hope this list is comprehensive enough to suit your needs!

Have fun!

Written on Feb 19, 2018

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