The Engine Room is a nonprofit organization that helps activists, organizations, and other social change agents make the most of data and technology to increase their impact. Since 2011, it has supported more than 200 organizations around the globe.
The organization has posted a frank, helpful article about ceasing to support an app for good called Panic Button that it developed with Amnesty International. It's a great example of how apps4good are far easy to dream up and launch than to sustain and grow.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
We were convinced that once up and running, we would be able to demonstrate the concrete need for Panic Button, thereby attracting further long-term funding and permitting us to hire a project team. Our vision was to spin off Panic Button from Amnesty International, allowing us to explore a wider range of revenue models that would permit the app to scale, evolve and localize to cater to a greater number of countries and languages over time.
Unfortunately this never happened. Amnesty continued to put its own resources into keeping the project afloat but these were always small and temporary injections of resourcing. As such, the Panic Button project became a lesson in ‘what comes after innovation’. Despite broad community buy-in and a clear and stated need for the app by users, we couldn’t secure the funding that would move the project beyond its first, fledgling phase.
Making the decision to cease support for the Panic Button app was not an easy one, but it was also not an empty one. We believe that diving into the challenges we faced, and sharing them with our communities is key to building similar – and better – tools in the future. The challenges we faced are interlinked, and by no means specific merely to us.
While The Engine Room is ceasing support for the app, the code is all still available on Github. "This includes some features that have been worked on but not released, for any adventurous developers out there."
And on a related note is this post from 2013, asking where the evaluations are of all the many apps4good efforts and hackathons that get so much attention.