It is not hard to find apps catering to the whims of those with disposable incomes — witness the race to help diners score reservations at the hottest restaurants or provide homeowners with a rental butler. But as two noteworthy apps that recently won competitions in New York prove, good things can happen when developers are asked to turn their attention to the public need.

Heatseek NYC, the winner of the fifth annual NYC BigApps competition, which ended in mid-September, would allow tenants an easy way to record and report the temperature in their homes to ensure that landlords do not skimp on the heat.

Tug, an app that alerts pedestrians glued to their phones that they are about to step into an intersection, was one of two winners in the Connected Intersections challenge, sponsored by AT&T.

Heatseek and Tug are interesting to view in tandem, as both reflect a relatively prominent trend in app development. Each is designed with a piece of hardware in mind — they are not stand-alone apps, but rather part of a looped system of technology that their developers have conceived.