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Smudge Apps

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4.6/5 (8 reviews)
+6439743211 N/A Visit Website

About Smudge Apps

Smudge develops mobile solutions to help business around New Zealand engage with mobile device users. The culture and capability are fantastic and they have passed their expectations. Their designers are award-winners and their expert mobile app developers have masters to make high-quality apps. They always try to provide the best applications they can. They take great pride not just in their work but in all it’s helping their clients to achieve.

Last updated May 13, 2026

Services

Mobile App Development UI-UX Design iOS App Development

Industries Served

Advertising & Marketing Nonprofit & NGO Agriculture Gaming & Gambling Sports & Fitness Healthcare Mining & Metals

Smudge Apps Reviews

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A partnership that began with a single project and earned a place on our preferred vendor list

Sebastian Lapointe / CTO - Boreal Systems Inc
Verified
May 19, 2026

Project summary: Our campaign management workflow had grown to involve twelve different tools and significant manual reconciliation. The inefficiency was affecting both speed and accuracy.

We had worked with three agencies before this engagement. The comparison is not flattering to the others. What distinguished this team was a systematic approach to understanding the problem before proposing a solution — something that sounds obvious and is practiced far less often than it should be. The delivery phase ran to schedule, the codebase is clean enough that our internal engineers made positive comments during handover review, and we have not logged a critical incident in five months of live operation. We intend to use them for our next phase of work.

PROS

Senior-level engineering presence throughout the entire project, not just during the pitch, honest and commercially fair handling of scope changes, codebase that our internal team praised on review

CONS

We underestimated the input required from our subject matter experts during the requirements phase. The team flagged this early but our resource planning did not fully reflect it — our responsibility, not theirs

4.5
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
4.5
Cost
4.5
Communication
Project TypePOS System Development
IndustryAdvertising & Marketing
Project CostLess than $10,000
DurationDec 2025 – Apr 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As CTO at Boreal Systems Inc I oversee technology investment and delivery across our Advertising & Marketing operations in Toronto, Canada. We are a commercially focused business and our technology choices are always evaluated in terms of their direct contribution to business outcomes rather than technical elegance alone.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our platform had been maintained by a previous vendor for three years and the accumulated technical debt had reached a point where delivery velocity had dropped to a fraction of what it should have been. We needed fresh engineering expertise and a structured plan to address the underlying issues.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope covered the full POS System Development lifecycle: discovery and requirements definition, solution architecture, iterative development across twelve sprints, integration testing, performance validation, production deployment, and a structured four-week hypercare period. They also provided system documentation and a knowledge transfer programme for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We ran a structured shortlisting process across five vendors. The technical evaluation eliminated two immediately. Of the remaining three, this team's proposal was differentiated by the specificity of their POS System Development approach and the evidence base they provided — reference projects in Advertising & Marketing contexts, not generic case studies. The reference calls confirmed a track record that the proposal had described accurately.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Comprehensively. The discovery phase they ran was more thorough than anything we had experienced with previous vendors. They challenged requirements that were vague or contradictory, proposed alternatives where our initial thinking was limiting, and produced a functional specification that our internal stakeholders agreed was the clearest articulation of the product they had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Communication was proactive, timely, and appropriately calibrated. Technical updates for the engineering audience, executive summaries for the steering group, risk flags with proposed mitigations rather than just problem statements. The fortnightly sprint reviews gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every working session.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I had privately built a contingency expectation into my planning given the project complexity and the number of integrations involved. None of that contingency was needed. The delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice matched the approved budget to within a fraction of a percent. That outcome is rarer than the industry acknowledges.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Quantifying the impact precisely is complicated by other variables in our business, but the metrics we can attribute directly to the POS System Development work are meaningful: session duration up, conversion rate up, error rate down, and our NPS for the digital touchpoint has improved by eleven points. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The continuity of the team. The engineers who participated in the discovery sessions were the engineers who built the system. That consistency of institutional knowledge across a six-month project has a value that is difficult to quantify but easy to notice when it is absent. Every conversation built on the previous ones.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Unreservedly. We are in active scoping conversations for a second engagement and I expect this to develop into a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Advertising & Marketing sector looking for POS System Development expertise combined with genuine delivery discipline, I would put this team at the top of the evaluation list.

Technically rigorous, commercially grounded, and a genuine pleasure to work with

Liselotte Bakker / Head of Platform Engineering - Harbour Digital BV
Verified
May 15, 2026

Project summary: Several years of incremental development had left us with a platform that was technically functional but strategically limiting. A structured rebuild was the agreed path forward.

We had worked with three agencies before this engagement. The comparison is not flattering to the others. What distinguished this team was a systematic approach to understanding the problem before proposing a solution — something that sounds obvious and is practiced far less often than it should be. The delivery phase ran to schedule, the codebase is clean enough that our internal engineers made positive comments during handover review, and we have not logged a critical incident in five months of live operation. We intend to use them for our next phase of work.

PROS

Deep domain knowledge that reduced the discovery overhead significantly, proactive risk identification before issues became incidents, delivery cadence that our stakeholders found reassuring

CONS

Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project

4.5
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
4.0
Communication
Project TypeEmbedded Systems Development
IndustryNonprofit & NGO
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationAug 2025 – Mar 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at Harbour Digital BV, a growth-stage Nonprofit & NGO business based in Utrecht, Netherlands. As Head of Platform Engineering my remit spans product engineering, platform operations, and strategic vendor partnerships. We had reached an inflection point where our internal capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap at the pace our market required.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
The immediate problem was that our Embedded Systems Development capability had become the bottleneck limiting our ability to grow. Every feature request, every new client requirement, every internal initiative was delayed by a platform that had been extended beyond its original design. We needed a rebuild, not a patch.
What services did the company provide for your project?
End-to-end Embedded Systems Development delivery with particular depth in the integration and data migration components, which were the highest-risk elements of the programme. They supplemented this with a dedicated QA resource throughout development and a documented runbook for our operations team at handover.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A trusted peer in the Nonprofit & NGO sector had used them for a comparable Embedded Systems Development engagement and their recommendation was unequivocal. Our own due diligence confirmed the pattern they described. The combination of domain knowledge, Embedded Systems Development depth, and demonstrated delivery discipline was the deciding factor.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well, in part because they had relevant Nonprofit & NGO experience that reduced the context-setting overhead significantly. They understood the domain vocabulary, asked the right questions, and translated business requirements into technical specifications with a fidelity that meant the development phase had very few clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Communication was proactive, timely, and appropriately calibrated. Technical updates for the engineering audience, executive summaries for the steering group, risk flags with proposed mitigations rather than just problem statements. The fortnightly sprint reviews gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every working session.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the approved budget. The estimation accuracy was notable — they had broken the work down in sufficient detail during discovery that their forecast proved reliable throughout, rather than being a number that shifted with every change in scope. We received one change request and it was for scope we had introduced ourselves.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The most direct measure is the performance of the system in production. In the five months since go-live we have had zero P1 incidents, our page performance scores have improved across every Core Web Vitals metric, and two enterprise clients who had cited our previous platform limitations during contract negotiations have since renewed without that objection arising.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The willingness to be direct. When our requirements were unclear they said so. When our priorities were contradictory they explained why. When a technical approach we had assumed was the right one turned out to have significant downsides, they told us before we had committed to it. That kind of intellectual honesty is what I look for in a long-term technology partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes. I would add the context that this is not the cheapest option in the market and they are selective about the engagements they take on. If your primary criterion is price, there are alternatives. If you want a technology partner who can be trusted with a complex Embedded Systems Development programme in the Nonprofit & NGO space and will deliver against a serious brief, this is the team.

Service desk that outperformed our previous in-house team on every SLA we tracked

Maja Söderström / Head of Product Engineering - Scandia Digital AB
Verified
Apr 12, 2026

Project summary: Our engineering capacity was committed to maintaining existing systems and could not absorb a net-new build of this complexity. An external partner with the right skills was the only viable option.

The project brief was ambitious and we had received proposals ranging from two to five times our eventual budget from other vendors. This team came back with a proposal that was commercially realistic and technically credible — and then delivered against it. That alignment between proposal and outcome is not something I take for granted. I have been on the other side of it enough times to know it requires both honesty in the sales process and discipline in delivery. We experienced both.

PROS

Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism

CONS

Pipeline availability for kickoff required a few weeks of lead time — in hindsight that selection pressure means you are working with a team that is in demand for the right reasons

4.5
Overall
4.5
Quality
4.0
Schedule
4.5
Cost
4.0
Communication
Project TypeIT Managed Services
IndustryAgriculture
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationJul 2025 – Mar 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As Head of Product Engineering at Scandia Digital AB I oversee technology investment and delivery across our Agriculture operations in Gothenburg, Sweden. We are a commercially focused business and our technology choices are always evaluated in terms of their direct contribution to business outcomes rather than technical elegance alone.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulatory requirements in our Agriculture segment had changed and the compliance timeline was set by our regulator, not by us. The IT Managed Services changes required were significant enough to justify engaging a specialist partner rather than diverting our internal team from the product roadmap.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope covered the full IT Managed Services lifecycle: discovery and requirements definition, solution architecture, iterative development across twelve sprints, integration testing, performance validation, production deployment, and a structured four-week hypercare period. They also provided system documentation and a knowledge transfer programme for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A trusted peer in the Agriculture sector had used them for a comparable IT Managed Services engagement and their recommendation was unequivocal. Our own due diligence confirmed the pattern they described. The combination of domain knowledge, IT Managed Services depth, and demonstrated delivery discipline was the deciding factor.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Comprehensively. The discovery phase they ran was more thorough than anything we had experienced with previous vendors. They challenged requirements that were vague or contradictory, proposed alternatives where our initial thinking was limiting, and produced a functional specification that our internal stakeholders agreed was the clearest articulation of the product they had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. The project manager maintained a clear view of the critical path at all times and communicated changes to it transparently. The one significant scope adjustment we made mid-project was handled through a clean change request process — fairly priced, clearly documented, and absorbed without disrupting the overall timeline.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes to both. There was a single sprint where a dependency on a third-party API introduced a one-week delay. The team identified it three weeks in advance, presented two mitigation options, and we agreed on an approach that recovered the schedule within the same sprint cycle. That level of foresight is what separates good project management from reactive problem management.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The ROI case we presented to our board was conservative by design. Current performance against the financial model suggests we will hit the projected payback point in under twelve months against an eighteen-month target. The operational efficiency gains in particular have exceeded the model, in part because the quality of the data the new platform generates supports decisions that the previous system could not.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The post-launch behaviour. Some vendors consider go-live to be the end of their professional obligation. This team treated it as the transition to a different kind of engagement. The hypercare period was substantive, the documentation was thorough and genuinely useful, and they checked in proactively at the thirty-day and ninety-day marks to review production metrics with us.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely. With a specific note that the value starts in the discovery phase — clients who approach that process with seriousness will get the most from the engagement. We invested appropriately at the front end and the returns are evident in what was delivered.

Consulting that delivered real options with real trade-offs rather than a predetermined answer

Flynn Buchanan / GM of Technology - Pacific Rim Commerce Group
Verified
Mar 20, 2026

Project summary: Several years of incremental development had left us with a platform that was technically functional but strategically limiting. A structured rebuild was the agreed path forward.

We gave this team an aggressive timeline, a technically complex scope, and a client-side project team that was stretched thin and not always available at the speed the engagement required. They absorbed all of that gracefully. Where they needed input they were precise about what they needed and when. Where they could proceed independently they did. The result was a delivery that landed on time despite the constraints on our side, which I regard as evidence of genuine professional maturity.

PROS

Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism

CONS

Their insistence on a detailed functional specification before development began felt like friction at the time. In retrospect, it was the reason the development phase ran without the ambiguity that has derailed similar projects for us previously

4.5
Overall
5.0
Quality
4.5
Schedule
4.0
Cost
4.0
Communication
Project TypeIT Consulting
IndustryGaming & Gambling
Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999
DurationFeb 2025 – Dec 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Pacific Rim Commerce Group operates in the Gaming & Gambling sector with headquarters in Perth, Australia. In my role as GM of Technology I am accountable for the full technology agenda — infrastructure, product, and vendor relationships. We are a commercially driven organisation and every technology decision is evaluated against a clear business case before it is approved.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a defined product vision for our next phase of growth in the Gaming & Gambling market but lacked the engineering depth internally to execute it. The IT Consulting requirements in particular required specialist experience that we could not realistically recruit for on the timeline our business plan required.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope covered the full IT Consulting lifecycle: discovery and requirements definition, solution architecture, iterative development across twelve sprints, integration testing, performance validation, production deployment, and a structured four-week hypercare period. They also provided system documentation and a knowledge transfer programme for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We had a failed engagement behind us and were more rigorous in our selection process as a result. We asked detailed questions about how they managed scope change, how they handled estimation, and how they communicated problems. The answers were specific, evidenced, and consistent across the team members we spoke to. That gave us confidence that the process was real rather than rehearsed.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well, in part because they had relevant Gaming & Gambling experience that reduced the context-setting overhead significantly. They understood the domain vocabulary, asked the right questions, and translated business requirements into technical specifications with a fidelity that meant the development phase had very few clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Outstanding. The discipline around asynchronous communication was particularly effective given the time zones involved between Perth, Australia and the delivery team. Written updates were specific and consistent, response times were same-day for anything that required a decision, and nothing fell through the cracks across a six-month engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the approved budget. The estimation accuracy was notable — they had broken the work down in sufficient detail during discovery that their forecast proved reliable throughout, rather than being a number that shifted with every change in scope. We received one change request and it was for scope we had introduced ourselves.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The ROI case we presented to our board was conservative by design. Current performance against the financial model suggests we will hit the projected payback point in under twelve months against an eighteen-month target. The operational efficiency gains in particular have exceeded the model, in part because the quality of the data the new platform generates supports decisions that the previous system could not.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their instinct for keeping the business objective visible throughout technical decision-making. I have worked with technically excellent teams who lose the strategic thread as complexity increases. This team maintained a clear connection between every architectural choice and the outcome we had agreed to achieve. That orientation made the trade-off conversations significantly easier.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Unreservedly. We are in active scoping conversations for a second engagement and I expect this to develop into a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Gaming & Gambling sector looking for IT Consulting expertise combined with genuine delivery discipline, I would put this team at the top of the evaluation list.

QA coverage that finally made Friday deployments feel like a professional activity

Erik Lindqvist / Chief Technology Officer - Nordic Cloud AB
Verified
Feb 26, 2026

Project summary: A previous engagement had delivered something that worked in staging and struggled in production. We approached this project with greater rigour in vendor selection as a result.

The technical quality of the final deliverable is the easiest thing to point to. The automated test coverage is thorough, the deployment pipeline is reliable, the documentation is genuinely useful rather than ceremonially produced. But the metric I keep returning to is the number of post-launch conversations we have not had to have. No incident calls at two in the morning. No emergency patches. No retrospective discussions about what went wrong. The absence of those events is the evidence I would show to someone considering this vendor.

PROS

Clear and consistent communication adapted appropriately for both technical and non-technical stakeholders, shared tooling that gave our team real-time visibility, reliable sprint delivery throughout

CONS

Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project

4.0
Overall
4.0
Quality
4.0
Schedule
4.0
Cost
3.5
Communication
Project TypeQuality Assurance & Testing
IndustrySports & Fitness
Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999
DurationAug 2025 – Nov 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at Nordic Cloud AB, a growth-stage Sports & Fitness business based in Stockholm, Sweden. As Chief Technology Officer my remit spans product engineering, platform operations, and strategic vendor partnerships. We had reached an inflection point where our internal capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap at the pace our market required.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a defined product vision for our next phase of growth in the Sports & Fitness market but lacked the engineering depth internally to execute it. The Quality Assurance & Testing requirements in particular required specialist experience that we could not realistically recruit for on the timeline our business plan required.
What services did the company provide for your project?
End-to-end Quality Assurance & Testing delivery with particular depth in the integration and data migration components, which were the highest-risk elements of the programme. They supplemented this with a dedicated QA resource throughout development and a documented runbook for our operations team at handover.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A trusted peer in the Sports & Fitness sector had used them for a comparable Quality Assurance & Testing engagement and their recommendation was unequivocal. Our own due diligence confirmed the pattern they described. The combination of domain knowledge, Quality Assurance & Testing depth, and demonstrated delivery discipline was the deciding factor.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well, in part because they had relevant Sports & Fitness experience that reduced the context-setting overhead significantly. They understood the domain vocabulary, asked the right questions, and translated business requirements into technical specifications with a fidelity that meant the development phase had very few clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Communication was proactive, timely, and appropriately calibrated. Technical updates for the engineering audience, executive summaries for the steering group, risk flags with proposed mitigations rather than just problem statements. The fortnightly sprint reviews gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every working session.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I had privately built a contingency expectation into my planning given the project complexity and the number of integrations involved. None of that contingency was needed. The delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice matched the approved budget to within a fraction of a percent. That outcome is rarer than the industry acknowledges.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The ROI case we presented to our board was conservative by design. Current performance against the financial model suggests we will hit the projected payback point in under twelve months against an eighteen-month target. The operational efficiency gains in particular have exceeded the model, in part because the quality of the data the new platform generates supports decisions that the previous system could not.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The continuity of the team. The engineers who participated in the discovery sessions were the engineers who built the system. That consistency of institutional knowledge across a six-month project has a value that is difficult to quantify but easy to notice when it is absent. Every conversation built on the previous ones.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Unreservedly. We are in active scoping conversations for a second engagement and I expect this to develop into a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Sports & Fitness sector looking for Quality Assurance & Testing expertise combined with genuine delivery discipline, I would put this team at the top of the evaluation list.

Company Info

Founded 2008
Employees 2 - 9
Hourly Rate N/A
Client Rating 4.6/5 (8 reviews)

Rating Breakdown

Quality
4.8
Schedule
4.7
Cost
4.6
Communication
4.4

FAQs

Has Smudge Apps actually shipped a SaaS product before?
It's a common line of work for a company like Smudge Apps — multi-tenant architecture, subscription billing hooked up properly, and cloud-native deployment built for a product meant to scale as a service rather than a one-off build. For context, it has served clients in New-zealand, and it has been operating since 2008.
Does Smudge Apps actually build with AI, or just talk about it?
Plenty of modern software teams, Smudge Apps included, now build real AI and machine learning features — chatbots, predictive models, computer vision, and automation that goes beyond simple rule-based scripts. For context, it has served clients in New-zealand, and it has been operating since 2008.
What's actually in Smudge Apps's technical toolkit?
The exact stack shifts by project, but Smudge Apps commonly works across things like React, Angular, Vue.js, Node.js, Python, .NET, Java, PHP, Flutter, React Native, native iOS and Android, and cloud platforms like AWS and Azure. For context, it has experience across industries such as Healthcare, Nonprofit & NGO, Mining & Metals, Gaming & Gambling, Advertising & Marketing and Agriculture, and it reports a team size of 2 - 9 professionals.
Will Smudge Apps sign an NDA before we even discuss the project in detail?
Most professional shops, including Smudge Apps, expect to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement before getting into specifics — it's a fairly standard ask and a reasonable one to make before sharing anything sensitive. For context, its listed capabilities span iOS App Development, Mobile App Development and UI-UX Design, and it reports a team size of 2 - 9 professionals.
What makes Smudge Apps worth considering over other options?
What tends to set Smudge Apps apart usually comes down to some mix of technical depth, relevant industry experience, how clients describe working with them, their development approach, communication habits, and whether they can actually deliver something that scales. Founded in 2008, the company has built a track record of delivering projects across various industries.
What kind of software work does Smudge Apps take on?
Smudge Apps typically covers the standard range of software development work — mobile apps, web platforms, custom internal tools, UI/UX design, cloud infrastructure, AI integrations, and larger enterprise builds. Its core focus areas include iOS App Development, Mobile App Development and UI-UX Design.
What are the actual contract options if I want to work with Smudge Apps?
Most companies structured like Smudge Apps give you a choice between a fixed-price contract, a dedicated team arrangement, or time-and-materials billing, so you can pick whichever lines up with your budget and how well-defined your scope already is. For context, it has experience across industries such as Healthcare, Nonprofit & NGO, Mining & Metals, Gaming & Gambling, Advertising & Marketing and Agriculture, and it has served clients in New-zealand.
What's the easiest way to actually get in touch with Smudge Apps?
Most businesses reach Smudge Apps through its website, a direct email, or a contact form — any of which works for discussing what you need, booking an initial conversation, or asking for a rough estimate. For context, it has experience across industries such as Healthcare, Nonprofit & NGO, Mining & Metals, Gaming & Gambling, Advertising & Marketing and Agriculture, and it has been operating since 2008.
What happens with Smudge Apps after the project actually launches?
Like most established software teams, Smudge Apps typically sticks around post-launch for ongoing maintenance — bug fixes, performance tuning, security patching, new feature work, and general technical support. For context, its listed capabilities span iOS App Development, Mobile App Development and UI-UX Design, and its average project cost is reported at $5000000+.

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