Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users

http://missionlab.posterous.com/37126809

by ish_ish • 16 years ago

89 35 16 years ago

missionlab.posterous.com

A blog post discussing my latest app release and some of the technical and design issues I had while building it.

ahparikh• 16 years ago

Great details on how to be a great mobile location app.

middlegeek• 16 years ago

That's a great app. I have wanted something similar for android. It combines the ease of text messaging without the commitment and participation required for Latitude or the like.

threepointone• 16 years ago

The alert has a "Do it!" button.

Reminded me of : http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

jmtame• 16 years ago

does anyone know why the default location is cupertino in the ios simulator? i want to think it's because of speed (why take time to find your location during each run?), but i'm starting to wonder if it's because the difficulty in getting an accurate location lock on a wifi network for example.

i've found that detecting geolocation on a non-mobile device such as a laptop (even using the latest w3c navigator.geolocation standard) is pretty unreliable. it took me some searching to figure out that the function has an infinite timeout by default, which makes debugging interesting. sometimes just doesn't get the location at all. a professor had expressed the same sentiments in more length here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3397585/navigator-geoloca...

andrewljohnson• 16 years ago

I'm sure the reasons are just a) they wanted to hard-code a location for the simulator, since it doesn't have a GPS, and b) Apple is located in Cupertino.

For my GPS-app, we have code to simulate fake GPS readings on the simulator.

alexbell• 16 years ago

I believe the simulator can also do location by wifi if possible.

GimmeDaAccess• 16 years ago

Isn't this basically Glympse minus the timer element?

http://gigaom.com/2010/12/17/8-apps-for-the-new-smartphone-o...

ish_ish5• 16 years ago

I mentioned that in the blog post under "The competitive scare"

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

I think this is a great idea. I would add one feature: send a 2nd text message when you're within 1 mile. (Or whatever distance you choose.) My girlfriend wants me to notify her before I actually get to her apartment. Having my smartphone do this for me automatically would be awesome! (This way I don't need to use my phone while I'm driving.)

ryanpetrich• 16 years ago

A text message can't be sent without confirmation from the user on iOS.

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

Then a message should be sent to a server that forwards the SMS text.

prakster• 16 years ago

Awesome. You should partner with UberCab: www.uber.com

ish_ish5• 16 years ago

That's a great idea I'll email them. I've also thought about approaching delivery-type services like Dominos.

hopeless• 16 years ago

I wonder if you couldn't white-label the technology and sell it to those types of businesses. That way they could apply their own branding and incorporate it into their existing sites.

nico_h2• 16 years ago

Hi ! Very nice idea, I like the app. A few comments :

- Why the heck is it free ? I would have paid for it !

- Can you make the web page for your follower display nicely on a computer web browser ?

- corollary : could you allow direct sending of emails ? (rather than copy + switch app + paste)

- on the web site, you could show screens of the app, not just the client.

Otherwise congratulations, it's quite nice and that would have been the next app I would have developed if I ever finish my current one;-)

ish_ish5• 16 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I debated heavily between paid and free when I released it. I went with free initially because I felt I wanted to get a simple version of the product out there. At some point I might go the freemium root and offer a paid version with some additional features.

- Emails are coming along with better formatting for desktop browsers

- Thanks for feedback on the website!

nico_h2• 16 years ago

Another point : it's an interesting developer's perspective, but its lacking in numbers. Maybe too young for that ? There are no ads on the client nor on the app, and the app is free. Do you have a monetization plan ?

geuis• 16 years ago

Let this be a lesson to anyone working on a product. I've been building an app that does exactly the same thing for the last couple of months. You have to be first to market.

ish_ish5• 16 years ago

Hey -- neither of us is first to market on this one. I found out of others even as I was building it. I almost gave up but then figured I might as well go for it. I address this in the post -- the market it young and is ripe for plenty of products.

lawrence• 16 years ago

glympse? Ish, would like to connect with you. we build geo apps, and work out of the mission (in the us bank building on 22nd and Mission).

nickfromseattle• 16 years ago

Did Apple make the first mp3 player? Did Google make the first search engine?

The point is his app is nowhere near critical mass and there is likely a fair amount of room for competition. Think of his success as proof there is a demand for apps like his (and yours).

T_S_2• 16 years ago

No you don't. Not even Facebook was first. I like to call it validation.

Ever notice how a lot of web pages used to suck. Nowadays a lot of apps are like that (present app excepted :-). Keep going!

mildavw• 16 years ago

Why do you have to be first to market? I too have started building this very app and still plan to finish it. There are a thousand factors that determine how your app/business progresses. Market timing is just one small one.

dkihanya• 16 years ago

awesome app! very useful for letting someone know where you are if you're running late for a meeting. Also cool to let friends know you are around if you're in their town travelling. Nice job!

dirtyaura3• 16 years ago

Great article. His observations of location polling strategies and battery life are spot on, so if you are interested in location-based services, read them carefully. When developing Jaiku Mobile (always-on rich presence sharing with location and other data) we learned same things.

There's actually two strategies that you've to manage: polling of the location (GPS usage) and sending it to the server (network usage). In 3G, there is a significant energy consumption cost, when you send small amount of data regularly to server, because the network stack has to be changed to higher-energy mode each time you send something over TCP/IP.

Even if you stay in a same location and the location data doesn't changed, you might need to send the data to server. Why? To indicate freshness of the data, server has to pinged to indicate that location data is still fresh, even if it hasn't changed. Indicating data's freshness can be important in tracking situation (e.g. Geoshare).

asmosoinio2• 16 years ago

Did you ever consider using CellID to detect whether location has changed, before checking more precisely from GPS? Haven't tested it in a real product myself, but found this strategy in an old Symbian app, and it seemed quite clever -- especially in a 3G (or 3.5/4/whatever) mobile network cell size should be small enough that if the user is really moving, the CellID will also change quite quickly. And energy consumption to poll this is almost 0, assuming the device is a phone that is connected to the mobile network anyways.

dirtyaura3• 16 years ago

Yes we used Cell ID and that was our main source of location data (GPS-enabled phones were quite rare back in 2006).

But cell id can change quite a lot even if you stay in the same place, depending on your signal strength.

Btw. did that old Symbian app happened to be called ContextPhone? It was a precursor of Jaiku Mobile.

elvirs• 16 years ago

wait a second, so none of the existing apps do this? is it because they have not thought of a simple thing like texting location url to a contact or they tried to lock in new users using twitter, facebook, etc. contact list import thing?

T_S_2• 16 years ago

Been looking for this. Wonder why that doesn't happen more often.

akulkarni• 16 years ago

Awesome, well-thought post by a clear veteran.

"With GeoShare I was consistently fighting against myself not to add more features that I knew would be useful. This was a difficult thing for me to resist since I myself used the product daily and had a sense what I wished it could do. But they say if you're not embarrased by your first product then you waited too long."

'nuf said.

BornInTheUSSR• 16 years ago

Congratulations on not only 'shipping' but documenting the process. I've been working on something technically similar, but with a very different application. Can't wait to share!

asgupta• 16 years ago

Great article.

Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users

Related Stories