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Comment by emilburzo | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty hard to sell "just" a location sharing app, most people want extra features to feel like it's worth paying for, even more so for subscriptions.

Some of the features I got requests for were: tracklogs/history, geofencing, possibility to automate start/stop, overview web page for fleet tracking and so on.

I just tried the app and love the high quality feel of it and I think the amount of features in the MVP should already cover the needs of most people for the free version.

Out of curiosity, how often do you update the location? I couldn't find any setting for that.

Source: built https://graticule.link/ to scratch my own itch, tried monetizing it but gave up since it would have needed to go in a direction I didn't care about.

PS: The email verification page is blank.

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Hi emilburzo. I'm happy to learn from your experience here. Yeah, selling "just" a location sharing app is indeed tough.

> how often do you update the location? I couldn't find any setting for that.

There's no user setting. On Android, I rely on the Job Scheduler service, so the most the app can be woken up is once every 15 minutes (less if the Android OS feels like it). However, there is also a BroadcastReceiver set up to receive locations when another app requests it. Lastly, a friend can request an update if it has been more than 3 minutes since the last update they've received. When they request the update, a Firebase message is sent to your phone and a service is started immediately to grab your location and send it back to your friend. The reason for all this fuzzy timing is to maximize battery energy. The alternative would be to keep a foreground service running all the time, but I've had complaints that people don't like seeing the service notification there and they don't want their battery drained.

In the (currently unreleased) iOS app, it's a similar set of of fuzzy conditions.

> PS: The email verification page is blank.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

> There's no user setting. On Android, I rely on the Job Scheduler service, so the most the app can be woken up is once every 15 minutes (less if the Android OS feels like it). However, there is also a BroadcastReceiver set up to receive locations when another app requests it. Lastly, a friend can request an update if it has been more than 3 minutes since the last update they've received. When they request the update, a Firebase message is sent to your phone and a service is started immediately to grab your location and send it back to your friend. The reason for all this fuzzy timing is to maximize battery energy.

Nice. I think this fits the infrequent updates scenario of the app very well.

> The alternative would be to keep a foreground service running all the time, but I've had complaints that people don't like seeing the service notification there [...]

Interesting, to me the periodic "updating location" notifications are way more jarring. Especially since Android allows the user to minimize (only visible when you pull down) or even hide the notification completely.

But yes, I definitely received this complaint a lot, but for me this was a no-go as I don't want people to be able to use it as a stalker tool (e.g. install on victim's phone without their knowledge).

I want to iterate again how polished the app feels, so you definitely have yourself a new free user :)

The way it solves the permanent location sharing feature is really nice and will try it out in a bit harder conditions (mountains with degraded signal).

I don't know if I would pay for it, maybe if it would be possible to pay as a family/group.

A massive thank you for Graticule - have been using it a lot when meeting up with friends for walks. When you're all about an hours drive away in different directions it's really handy to keep track on people's progress without disturbing their driving.

Two bits of feedback if you don't mind:

1) I only realised the other day that the tracking link didn't automatically change between activations (I now realise I can do it manually).

2) When meeting up with someone in the middle of nowhere recently, I noticed that it'd show their location on the map, but not mine. As I didn't know where I was, having a blue dot of my location so I can estimate their distance would be really handy.

Thank you again :)

Hey, since I removed all tracking from the app I've felt a bit blind if people are happy with it or more like just drive-by trying-it-once, so it always makes my day to hear genuine feedback (even more so when it's positive), thank you for that!

> I only realised the other day that the tracking link didn't automatically change between activations (I now realise I can do it manually).

Hmm, good point. I wouldn't automatically reset it for each session since there are people using it for multi-day stuff.

Would having a "link last reset at" timestamp in the main screen would have helped you realize that earlier?

> When meeting up with someone in the middle of nowhere recently, I noticed that it'd show their location on the map, but not mine. As I didn't know where I was, having a blue dot of my location so I can estimate their distance would be really handy.

Initially I thought that might be sketchy -- "why does it want to know MY location? I just want to watch" -- but perhaps making it a button/setting would be a good compromise? So something like a toggle for "show my location" on the webpage?

> When you're all about an hours drive away in different directions it's really handy to keep track on people's progress without disturbing their driving.

This is perfect because I've been trying to build a feature where you can combine multiple tracking links into one, and you see everybody on the same map. Where I always get stuck though is the UX.

On a computer it's pretty easy to have a page where you paste all the links and it generates a combined one, but I can't figure out a good UI/UX for doing this on mobile.

So if I can pick your brain for a bit... do you have any insights here?

How do you usually send/receive these links?

Would pasting them all on a page work for you on mobile?

Any better ideas?

Hey, thank you very much for the reply.

Either a "link reset at" or even just a note on the share link page saying "this link stays permanent between runs unless you choose to reset it" would be OK I guess. The only reason I realised it didn't change is because on arranging a meeting with friends recently, they said "oh yeah, i've already got that link, you sent it to me last time".

Entirely my own fault and own assumption... Maybe even a settings option to "preserve tracking URL between launches" or an option for "URL times out after xxx hours/days".

A togglable "show my location" would work fantastically for my use case. Even better if it were to show me a distance (20 miles away as the crow flies is still useful information if you're waiting for someone to arrive, though obviously doesn't take into account distance or time by road).

Multiple users on the map would be fantastic (I really do miss lattitude). I can't quite imagine how that would work without an immense amount of extra work. At the moment we tend to just share the URL via a facebook message, me having to paste multiple links in would work fine for me, but I can see less technical users having problems.

I guess in an ideal world, viewing someone elses graticule link would open in the app rather than the webpage. At that point clicking multiple links for different people would just add them all into my copy off the app so I could see everyone moving around just by opening my copy of graticule rather than keeping track of other people's URLs. Combined with an ability to set a lifetime on the link we could all generate a 24h tracking URL in the morning, post them all into a group chat and then it's just a few clicks for me to correlate them all together into the app (and then have them auto-remove as the links time out).

Having multiple maps on screen on the computer is acceptable if I'm just tracking multiple people (eg different delivery drivers); eg their actual location only matters to me. The second I have more than one person trying to meet up (even if it's me and someone else), then having disparate maps is a pain. As one tends to want them rather zoomed in I'm having to expend a lot of mental effort in trying to work out where each location is relative to each other, rather than reality. If it's an area of the country where I don't recognise village names then I'm having to crossreference a whole lot of information and keep it all in my head (and I'm stupid with a bad memory).

Hope this feedback is useful. I feel quite guilty about the fact I've suggested a tonne of work for yourself for the sake of making something I use for free easier for me, which doesn' seem entirely fair :)

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