Most of us who use vehicle pooling regularly with colleagues or friends end up creating WhatsApp groups and sending messages to know the whereabouts. This often results in little anxiety and some frustration when you end up waiting longer for reasons beyond the control of the driver.
Recently, a Kerala Volvo bus conductor was in the news for his proactive measure of creating a WhatsApp group for regular commuters to share the bus location. While most apps including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+ have location sharing features they are either suitable to share the location just once or lag in terms of real-time tracking. Another disadvantage of apps like Messenger or Google+ is the memory footprint and the inability to share the location with non-members.
Glympse Express: A lightweight solution for real-time location tracking
Be it a bus or a car, not everyone boards the vehicle at the same point. There is always a first person to board and others board en route. This makes Glympse Express perfect candidate for the purpose - real-time location tracking on a live map.
The prime advantages of this app are -
- Tiny app, it is only 2.7 MB in size, consumes very little battery and memory
- Not everyone who travels needs to install it - just the first person can install it. While the first person needs to have location and data active, rest of the members just need an active data connection. The functionalities work fantastic even on a 2G connection!
- The first person uses the app to create a location link and shares it with any of the connected services, typically the WhatsApp group
- The link is short-lived, the duration of which can be set by the creator. Thus, there would be absolutely no privacy issues of the location being available after the journey is over. The creator can also choose to kill the link before it expires.
- Rest of the members can use the link to track the vehicle live on a map. This eliminates the uncertainty w.r.t. possible arrival time and the first person is saved from the trouble of replying to messages or answering calls asking for whereabouts of the vehicle
Do you use Glympse or any such app to ease out your group commute? Share your experience with us.
