RadarNav, almost a month in

Published, then the drive to work

I launched RadarNav the way you are not supposed to. The App Store approved it on 25 September, I wrote a post on Reddit, published it, and went out the door without waiting to see whether anyone answered.

On the way to work I looked at the map in the app. There were reports on the road ahead of me, and none of them were mine. People I had never met had installed it, worked it out without a tutorial, and were already telling the next driver what was coming. That is the whole idea of the product, and it was working before I had parked.

Why the Balkans

Timing did a lot of the work. Montenegro and North Macedonia had both just installed new speed cameras, and drivers wanted to know where they were. RadarNav already had them on the map: in Montenegro the fixed cameras come from the government's own published project document, next to what drivers report live. On the first day it was in the top downloads.

Then it travelled. In its first three weeks it reached the App Store charts in eleven countries: first in Montenegro, second in Kosovo, third in North Macedonia, fifth in Albania and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, seventh in Croatia.

Android, seventeen days later

The app is one Expo and React Native codebase, so Android was never a second product. Google Play still has its own review, its own testing tracks and its own opinions, so RadarNav went through closed and internal testing while the iPhone version was already on the road. The first public release on Google Play went out on 12 October. Same account, same map, same reports: a driver on Android and a driver on an iPhone warn each other.

Next, the car

Using it on my own commute made the next step obvious: a phone in a cradle is the wrong place to be tapping. So the next version puts RadarNav on the car's own screen, on CarPlay and on Android Auto.

• The map with cameras and reports on the dashboard, and alerts you can see and hear through the car.
• An alert you can hide for the rest of the drive, or mute for that kind of report, with one tap.
• Once you pass a report, the car asks whether it is still there.
• A report from the car is one button, a grid of report kinds, and one tap to send.
• With a subscription, destination search and turn-by-turn guidance on the car's screen.

It is finished and in review with Apple and Google now.

What the first weeks taught me

I keep coming back to that drive to work. An app like this is only as good as the last driver who reported, and the people using it have been quicker and more generous than I planned for. Thank you to everyone who reported, confirmed, or voted a stale report off the map.

The map, the reports and the alerts are free, with no ads, on the App Store and Google Play. How it was designed and built is in the case study.