Vroom Features: Introducing Live Location Tracking
The Vroom app is an on-demand transportation platform that is constantly evolving. Every week, our technical team optimizes the app’s existing features and introduces updates and new features as well. Today, we introduce a recurring series on our blog, titled Vroom Features, which is aimed at announcing new app features for our users to take advantage of. Follow this series to learn about the latest updates that are pushed into the Vroom app!
Today, we are excited to announce the introduction of live location tracking in the Vroom app! While we are delighted and have been validated by the steady increase in the daily number of rides offered through our app, our customers have also taken their time to point out areas in which we can improve their Vroom experience. One major request has been to reduce the time it takes for a rider to pick them up after they have booked their ride. On the operations side, we have consistently responded to this request by increasing the number of riders on our platform, and this has yielded significant results for our customers. Our live location tracking feature is yet another response to this request.
Live location tracking has become a ubiquitous feature of on-demand transportation apps. With it, passengers are able to track their drivers as they approach their pickup locations, and continue tracking their ride progress during their trips. Our customers found it difficult to coordinate with our riders because they were not able to see them approach their pickup locations in real time, and several of them cancelled their rides because they did not know exactly how long it would take for their riders to reach them. As more and more customers raised this issue with us, we decided to tackle it head on.
Initially, we developed our live location feature internally, but we wanted to increase its level of accuracy. We decided to do so using HyperTrack. HyperTrack offers detailed live location tracking that can be integrated in existing applications at an affordable cost. Unfortunately, integrating HyperTrack in our backend wasn’t the easiest process, and we had multiple issues with trying to integrate it using our existing Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) notifications. While the HyperTrack customer support team was extremely helpful, they ultimately weren’t able to resolve the issue itself, so we decided to switch to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) notifications instead. HyperTrack immediately worked once this change was made, and we were able to get the live location tracking we needed.
In just the first couple of days of test use, our HyperTrack integration has already shown us marked positive results. We were able to break our daily rides record, and we partially attribute this success to our live location tracking feature. In this time, we have detected a few small bugs with our HyperTrack integration and have reported them to the HyperTrack team, and they have been quick to help us resolve these issues with us. We also plan to explore their heat map functionality to improve our rider efficiency in the future.
We hope to improve the accuracy of our live location tracking over time to make our customer experience even better. We hope you enjoy this new feature of our app, and have more safe and comfortable rides with us!
Nikhil Venkatesa
