Marcos Salas Abelló

65K+

Turn Off PC, from idea to the stores

Turn Off PC started as a fresh graduate's itch to solve something silly: shutting down the computer without walking over to it. Today it also turns it on from anywhere in the world, and everything that came after —Siri, widgets, Android routines— exists thanks to the trust and support of its users.

how I built it (Medium)

+45%

More battery, same phone

With elderly people a slip can have consequences, so it was worth squeezing a battery that already held up well. Between weeks of field testing and a combination of geofencing, activity recognition and location requests triggered by cell-tower changes, it now lasts 45% longer on the same hardware.

how we did it (LinkedIn)

24/7

Winning the battle against Android

For many people the screen reader isn't an aid: it's how they use the phone. That means the speech engine has to stay alive around the clock, no exceptions. And Android is built for the opposite — the moment it decides to save battery, Doze starts putting to sleep whatever runs in the background. We tried text-to-speech (TTS) library after library, and they all ended the same way: a silent phone. So we wrote our own, native, with a watchdog that keeps an eye on the speech engine and brings it back the moment it falls.

how we solved it (LinkedIn)