Currently, one of the biggest complaints of the Vandy Vans service is that it isn't accurate. I have two ideas on how it might be possible to improve this.
Device Verification
When a user receives a response from the Syncromatics API, instead of directly displaying Syncromatics's arrival time in minutes, the app could take the latitude and longitude of the van in question and use the MKDirections class to get Apple's estimated ETA of the van to the stop in question. This option would take a bit more time because it would have to send a request to Syncromatics, get the result, and then send a request using MKDirections. While the result would hopefully be more accurate, the user would have to wait longer for a response.
Crowdsourcing
This option necessitates our own Vandy Vans backend, but provided we have this, we could count on the 2000 users we have using our app to provide the data for us. If we know a user is on a van (we could possibly figure this out by looking, in the background, at the user's current velocity, current location, and if the vans are currently running), we could send the MKDirections ETA to our backend and have other devices pull that data. When no users are on a given van to send us data, we default to the Syncromatics API.
Currently, one of the biggest complaints of the Vandy Vans service is that it isn't accurate. I have two ideas on how it might be possible to improve this.
Device Verification
When a user receives a response from the Syncromatics API, instead of directly displaying Syncromatics's arrival time in minutes, the app could take the latitude and longitude of the van in question and use the
MKDirectionsclass to get Apple's estimated ETA of the van to the stop in question. This option would take a bit more time because it would have to send a request to Syncromatics, get the result, and then send a request usingMKDirections. While the result would hopefully be more accurate, the user would have to wait longer for a response.Crowdsourcing
This option necessitates our own Vandy Vans backend, but provided we have this, we could count on the 2000 users we have using our app to provide the data for us. If we know a user is on a van (we could possibly figure this out by looking, in the background, at the user's current velocity, current location, and if the vans are currently running), we could send the
MKDirectionsETA to our backend and have other devices pull that data. When no users are on a given van to send us data, we default to the Syncromatics API.