Orbit
In 2016, two UCL students — the founders-to-be of CodeLeap — set out to answer fake news with a map: first-hand photos, each pinned to the spot it was taken. Orbit reached a working alpha on iOS and Android with a deployed AWS backend, and never publicly launched. We include it because the product thinking and the engineering still stand.
What we did Orbit was CodeLeap's founders' own pre-CodeLeap startup — native-feel iOS and Android apps, a scalable AWS backend and a prioritisation algorithm, built to a working alpha. It never publicly launched.
The news, on the map. Orbit started as a university project at UCL in late 2016, built by the two founders who would go on to start CodeLeap. The idea: when trust in media is falling, let people see a place for themselves — a global map where users upload photos pinned to where they were taken, and anyone can browse an area for current, first-hand imagery or draw an area and request a picture from someone nearby. Through 2017 the founders designed and built the whole product themselves — native-feel apps for iOS and Android, a scalable backend on AWS, and a prioritisation algorithm to surface the freshest, most useful posts — and put a pre-alpha in the hands of ten real users.
What we built
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A map of first-hand photos
Every photo is pinned to the exact place it was taken, so browsing the map shows an area as it actually looks right now — a demonstration, a crowded park — from someone standing there, not from a stock feed.
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Request a picture
Draw an area on the map and ask people nearby for a photo of it. Instead of searching for coverage that may not exist, you ask the crowd directly — and someone on the spot answers with the real view.
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Prioritisation algorithm
A ranking algorithm the founders treated as the product's core IP, weighing recency, votes and comments to decide which posts surface first — so the map led with what was current and useful, not just what was loudest.
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Working alpha on both platforms
Native-feel iOS and Android apps backed by a deployed, scalable AWS backend — designed, built and carried to a working alpha on real devices by two people, and tested pre-alpha with ten real users.
Why this matters to you:
Orbit never launched — no beta, no App Store release, no user numbers to quote, and we won't pretend otherwise. What it shows is where CodeLeap's founders started: designing and engineering a complete two-platform product themselves, from map UX to backend to ranking algorithm, years before doing it for clients.
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