Richard Witherspoon
I am an iOS app developer with 8 years of experience developing, testing and publishing apps for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac. In addition to having multiple apps of my own published on the App Store, I work full-time as an engineering manager, tech lead, and iOS developer at Fetch Rewards. I earned my formal education in electrical engineering and economics from RIT in 2019.
App Store
About Me
I'm a full-time Engineering Manager and iOS developer from southern New Hampshire who works full-time at Fetch Rewards and occasionally dabbles with creating and updating my own apps. I've been developing for Apple's platforms since 2017 and absolutely love it. I find my career to be incredibly rewarding and the iOS community is amazing. I look forward to seeing what my future can be.
Hobbies
When I'm not writing code, you can find me working out, riding my motorcyles, hiking, reading, and spending quality time with my fiancé and dog.
Accolades
FULU $20,000 Echelon Bounty Winner
Winner of the FULU Foundation's $20,000 bounty for successfully reverse engineering and repairing Echelon fitness equipment that had been locked down by a firmware update. Echelon pushed an update that forced their bikes, treadmills, and rowers to connect to their servers before functioning, breaking compatibility with third-party apps like Sync Spin and QZ that users relied on. This anti-consumer move prevented people from using their purchased hardware with the software of their choice. My solution restored interoperability and gave users back control of their own devices, championing the right-to-repair movement and consumer freedom. The bounty was offered by Louis Rossmann's FULU Foundation as part of their mission to fight against companies that restrict device ownership through software locks.
Witherspoon says that, basically, Echelon added an authentication layer to its products, where the piece of exercise equipment checks to make sure that it is online and connected to Echelon’s servers before it begins to send information from the equipment to an app over Bluetooth. “There’s this precondition where the bike offers an authentication challenge before it will stream those values. It is like a true digital lock,” he said. “Once you give the bike the key, it works like it used to. I had to insert this [authentication layer] into the code of my app, and now it works.”
— As quoted in 404 Media
Projects
Below you can find the most notable apps that I have worked on. These include my companies applications, contracting projects, as well as my own personal apps. Most of them can still be found on the app store today.
