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Under the Radar’s founder DIYs himself an app

Taken aback by the costly quotes he received for a bespoke iPhone app, Under the Radar’s (UTR) founder Daryl Fincham went and bought some how-to books and developed one on his own. The year-long labour of love has culminated with the launch of the UTR app for iPhone today.

The free app displays music news from the main site, has a gig guide (both in calendar view and location-based) and ticketing functionalities which let users buy passes to their favourite artists and use their phones as tickets. He tells StopPress that over the year of development the app’s original scope changed significantly.

“When I started the app was really about displaying news content and gigs, using information we already have on the website. As we started adding maps to the gigs, it became clear that the location features needed to play a much more important role in the whole thing,” he says. 

Fincham has come a long way since founding UTR almost a decade ago. Although he now works as the lead developer at MediaWorks, he says that UTR is still a project of passion. Fincham admits it’s unlikely UTR would have an app if he had to pay the market price to have someone else develop it for him.

“We had a few quotes for the original [simpler]vision of the app and even those were a bit out of our reach,” he says.

The app has spots for advertising, although it’s not bloated with it. Jagermeister has signed up as the first major sponsor, on board for three months.

Fincham says an Android version is in the works and – again – teaching himself the skills required to develop it himself.

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