Ridejoy for iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Ridejoy for iPhone

ridejoy.com

82 pointskalvin17 comments

Would love any comments/suggestions you have-- this was our first iPhone app for those involved (mainly one designer and one engineer), so it was quite the learning experience. We're expecting a lot of, um, good feedback :) Thanks!

Did you build it on something like Parse?

Nope, we already had a full backend for our web service so introducing a new dependency for only part of their value prop didn't seem worthwhile

(Though we love the people at Parse, and the product looks pretty great!)

Ridejoy looks great, but Canadians out there should really take a look at LiveRides (http://liverides.com)

Their app does what Ridejoy does and more - it even lets you securely communicate and track where a driver is when he/she is on his/her way to pick you up.

I'm really glad to see people in this space. I'm fed up of big oil and driving my car alone. Driving should be a social experience with friendly people that doesn't hurt the planet needlessly.

Ridejoy has hundreds of active rides in Canada (especially around Vancouver, but also Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa) and three Canadian cities are in the Popular Destinations section of our iPhone app.

We also launched our iPhone app in Canada: http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/08/14/ridejoy-ride-sharing-app-m...

So definitely check out Ridejoy in Canada as well :)

(Good luck to gozman/LiveRides, more people trying rideshare helps everyone)

I'm also fed up with big oil.

I tested it out for the Chicagoland area to see how much saturation they have here, and did a search for a trip from the city to a NW suburb for tomorrow.

1 result came up, so I clicked, and it brought up a Craigslist page within an iFrame. Is Ridejoy just scraping Craigslist? Genuinely curious.

We do show matching rides from Craigslist as a service to our users. Using an iframe means we don't need to scrape/copy the content to show it, but it still looks good/works well. CL seems fine with it, we haven't had issues with them. And we send lots of our traffic to them, not that they need it :)

“Share rides with friendly people to (...) Every week, Ridejoy helps thousands of friendly drivers and passengers share rides and save on gas.”

That’s very nice, but nowhere in the FAQ is explained how Ridejoy guarantees that only friendly people get a ride. Who’s to say I’m not picking up an axe murderer?

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/hairyarm.asp

Great question and thanks for linking to the snopes article de-bunking this myth.

Most Americans have shared rides in some form, whether as a carpool or a campus ride board. We incorporate a number of identity & safety features and are bringing far more transparency and accountability to ridesharing.

Like any form of public transit, there is some risk involved, but ultimately we empower our users to make informed decisions. In line with the success of Couchsurfing, Meetup and other services, we see more and more people interested in rideshare as a fun and affordable form of transportation and every week thousands of people are making the decision to share rides on Ridejoy.

Oh and if you're curious about how we built the app - here's an article on our design process:

http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/16/ridejoy-for-ios-behind-the-...

Ridejoy levels-up. Awesome jobs guys! It looks fantastic.

Thanks so much! Hope we're able to match you with some awesome people to rideshare with!

I used ridejoy to find a ride to a trail race a few weeks ago-- it works fantastically. It was a bit annoying having to check online day-of though; it's gonna be nice having it on my phone next time.

Any plans to make it available for international customers?

Congrats!

Any particularly interesting lessons learned?

Thanks! Longer may come down the road but some off the top of my head:

Mobile is totally different from web - small screen, on the go, harder to easily iterate after launch

Get a feel for the apps you like/aspire to be - check out cool apps and get ideas from the ones you like

Figure out what you're optimizing for - limited real estate means you need to focus on the flows that matter to you

Do multiple rounds of user testing - you are going to be surprised by what people try to do

Polish comes at the very end - easy to get ahead of yourself and you might have to throw it out

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