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OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

mendelgreenberg.com

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Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#61

Post by pavel_lishin »

SirFatty wrote: post #58
pavel_lishin wrote: post #57

We own a Subaru, and the app has all sorts of data in it: the car's current location, the odometer reading, and fuel status, sort of - it only displays the "until empty" distance, and the average MPG. I'm surprised it doesn't show even an estimate of how much gasoline is in it. So if I were to do this, I'd find a way to read that data somehow, and then I'd just need to know who was driving. (Which, as someone pointed…

"I'd find a way to read that data somehow..." Kind like the ? before Profit!

Yeah, without the profit :P

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#62

Post by chabad360 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #57

We own a Subaru, and the app has all sorts of data in it: the car's current location, the odometer reading, and fuel status, sort of - it only displays the "until empty" distance, and the average MPG. I'm surprised it doesn't show even an estimate of how much gasoline is in it. So if I were to do this, I'd find a way to read that data somehow, and then I'd just need to know who was driving. (Which, as someone pointed…

I would like to offer that as a feature. There are some companies that sell access to connected car APIs, so I would probably go through that route.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#63

Post by chabad360 »

thomas_viaelo wrote: post #60
benhurmarcel wrote: post #45

I’m surprised the author went for native apps rather than a PWA for this use

Did you weigh home screen widgets here? For "log mileage when you refuel", a one-tap widget feels much closer to the moment than open Safari, find the bookmark, hit the button. PWAs on iOS still can't put one on the home screen. Curious if cross-platform was the call from the start, or if widgets came up at all.

Widgets are possible to do with Flutter, but you have to implement them natively and do a bunch of FFI for passing data. I went cross-platform from the start because I have only so much time, and it's much easier to write 95% of the code once instead of twice.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#64

Post by teejmya »

chabad360 wrote: post #40

Hi HN! OP here. This is my first post and I'm very grateful to see it on the front page. This app was a lot of fun to build, and I really enjoyed putting together the writeup. I've been very inspired by the other stories shared here to write my own, so seeing the comments has been very validating. I guess I'll be around answering questions and comments as I see them. Thanks for reading and responding.

Hey, cool thing! Personal apps are awesome, and I really enjoyed your story.

I hadn't seen you mention OBD in this article, which is built in to most cars from the past 25 years.

If your shared car has it, you could put one of those Bluetooth LE readers in the port, and have copies of your app connect to the BLE signal on "vehicle return" to calculate milegae driven and maybe more, depending on what the car reports!

Might be worth playing around with, either way congrats on your cool thing

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#65

Post by motoroco »

thomas_viaelo wrote: post #60
benhurmarcel wrote: post #45

I’m surprised the author went for native apps rather than a PWA for this use

Did you weigh home screen widgets here? For "log mileage when you refuel", a one-tap widget feels much closer to the moment than open Safari, find the bookmark, hit the button. PWAs on iOS still can't put one on the home screen. Curious if cross-platform was the call from the start, or if widgets came up at all.

you can tap the Share button and use Add to Home Screen on any website in iOS Safari, including PWAs. it even works on hn

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#66

Post by benhurmarcel »

thomas_viaelo wrote: post #60
benhurmarcel wrote: post #45

I’m surprised the author went for native apps rather than a PWA for this use

Did you weigh home screen widgets here? For "log mileage when you refuel", a one-tap widget feels much closer to the moment than open Safari, find the bookmark, hit the button. PWAs on iOS still can't put one on the home screen. Curious if cross-platform was the call from the start, or if widgets came up at all.

I don’t think PWA can do widgets indeed, but they can have an icon on the iOS home screen.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#67

Post by m01 »

compiler-guy wrote: post #56
tantalor wrote: post #54

Good example of over-engineering. This could be easily solved with a pencil and notepad.

Availability and location cannot be solved with a note pad.

Restricting the scope to those two problems would remove 1/3 use-cases and around half of the pages required (going by the "The Birth of a Product" section's bullet point list). It's an interesting exercise to think of the absolute simplest way to solve a given problem. As the author had been "itching to build an app for a while", I think solving the problem was not the only goal here - fair enough.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#68

Post by fmajid »

chabad360 wrote: post #29
fmajid wrote: post #10

Manual data entry is just too unreliable and time-consuming. I don't see how this could work short of integrating OBD-II fuel consumption data combined with some sort of presence tracking.

I agree with you that at a large scale this is a problem. The one thing I decided very early on (when thinking about if/how I would grow this app beyond my family), is that this is for people who trust each other. If you don't trust the other people in your group to be responsible with the vehicle, then this app isn't gonna help. I'm trying to make the experience more smooth, not necessarily completely painless. Rega…

Obviously you trust your family, but some members may be more absent-minded than others and forget to record their trips.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#69

Post by noprocrasted »

compiler-guy wrote: post #56
tantalor wrote: post #54

Good example of over-engineering. This could be easily solved with a pencil and notepad.

Availability and location cannot be solved with a note pad.

A shared AirTag could probably take care of the location issue easily. I assume that in this scenario with exclusively trusted users, trading off privacy for the convenience might be worthwhile.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#70

Post by noprocrasted »

thomas_viaelo wrote: post #60
benhurmarcel wrote: post #45

I’m surprised the author went for native apps rather than a PWA for this use

Did you weigh home screen widgets here? For "log mileage when you refuel", a one-tap widget feels much closer to the moment than open Safari, find the bookmark, hit the button. PWAs on iOS still can't put one on the home screen. Curious if cross-platform was the call from the start, or if widgets came up at all.

Here's a low-tech approach: an SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram bot. You can just text it the info and even the location. This means all the logic is server-side and nothing on the client.
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