Apple · Build Challenge · 42 School
'Contexte': three students from 42 want to make online reading a little clearer
Born in forty-eight hours during a build challenge held at 42 School alongside Apple and the Cmd+F team, the Contexte app slips right into the iOS share menu to help you, in a single tap, better understand what you are reading.
It is 3:12 a.m. in the heart of the 42 School “cluster” in Paris. The bluish screens cast long shadows on the concrete walls. It is here, between two cups of lukewarm coffee, that three students — Louis Betmalle, Tristan Allal-Rimbaud and Frédéric Becerril — put together, in under two days, a small app named Contexte.
The idea fits in a single sentence. You are reading an article — this one, for instance. A concept escapes you, a claim feels shaky, a proper noun means nothing to you. Rather than opening five tabs, you tap the iOS Share button, you pick Contexte from the list, and within seconds the app hands you the essentials: the thread of the piece, the related ideas and the keywords worth digging into — all without ever leaving the page.
“We didn't want yet another app to open. We wanted something that lives where people already read — inside the share menu.” — Louis Betmalle, co-founder of Contexte
The idea comes from a slightly uncomfortable observation. “We read a huge amount, and we understand half as much as we think we do,” says Tristan Allal-Rimbaud. “Contexte is mostly a way to stop lying to ourselves about it.” The trio then set out to build a share extension, that iOS mechanism which lets any app slot itself into the menu triggered by the share icon.
The build challenge, run jointly by 42 School, Apple and the Cmd+F team, gave them the perfect setting. For forty-eight hours, Apple engineers moved from table to table, an eye on Share Extensions and interface best practices. “They pushed us to do less, but better,” recalls Frédéric Becerril. “A single action, flawless.”
The result is deliberately minimal: a sheet that slides up from the bottom of the screen, a title, a clear path, and just enough to go further. No account to create, no ads. The Cmd+F team, specialists in search and in connecting pieces of information, provided the engine that links the fragments of a text to what is being said elsewhere.
The project did not stop at the build challenge's forty-eight hours: the three friends keep refining it. Contexte will land on the App Store in the coming weeks. In the meantime, its creators have just one piece of advice: open an article, tap Share, and let Contexte do the rest.