Live location tracking is central to ride-hailing. It plays a major role in the location tracking of either driver or user when a ride is being called for.
However, in certain circumstances live-tracking isn’t necessary at all. Drivers can just use Google Maps or Waze to find the address that the user has indicated they're at. This is particularly true in well connected cities and urban areas.
For more remote cities and countries that have smaller roads and are littered with dirt trails and sometimes no addresses, location tracking is essential. With that said, live location can have GPS drift of sometimes up to 500 meters making it difficult to locate the user whilst on the road.
Enter Get Current Location.
Get Current Location is a feature we have at Roam that is essential for ride-hailing companies when the occasion arises. This is particularly true in countries that have more remote locations and less connected cities. This blog will be centered around how app developers in remote cities and countries can use Roam.ai to power their ride-hailing apps when giving an address is not possible, and when native GPS is drifting.
Get Current Location Crash Course
I’ve covered the topic in a previous blog post, but to save you the time I’ll do a quick rundown here.
Get Current Location is a cool function that helps you find out the location of a user on-demand. It's like a one-time thing, so there is no constantly updating live tracking involved. Live tracking can be pretty hectic, dealing with all sorts of stuff besides just getting your location. This is partly the reason you’ll get GPS drifting. But Get Current Location takes it a step further.
You can actually choose how accurate you want the location to be and set a timeframe for it. So if you want to be super precise and know your location within a meter, you can do that. The best part is, it's up to you to decide how accurate and timely you want it to be. If, for some reason, it can't get the exact location you asked for in the time you specified, it'll still do its best with what it's got.
Developers can choose the time and accuracy variables of their desire, but this decision ultimately comes down to the use-case, and industry you’re in.
How it can apply for Ride-hailing
That brings us to the next point, how can it be applied to ride-hailing?
With live tracking not being as useful for the driver as it is for the customer, Get Current Location delivers pinpoint accuracy for user pickup. Since a user is generally stationary whilst waiting for the driver, live tracking is almost pointless and demands unnecessary battery life from the mobile device. With all the drifting problems that can occur, it can also send a driver to a location with a drifting error of up to 500 meters. Not ideal when compared to Get Current Location’s accuracy level of down to 1 meter. You’d really need glasses if you can’t find a user from that short of a distance. You probably shouldn’t be driving either. That’s just a hazard for everyone involved. Specsavers anyone?
Most significantly, however, is how Get Current Location serves as an alternative to location tracking in more remote areas and cities. It’s in the cases where you’ll have smaller streets, sometimes trails, that are unnamed and where an address is not feasible. App developers in cities and in regions such as Africa and Asia can use Roam’s Get Current Location solution to circumvent this challenge, and when native GPS starts to drift.
User’s and or driver’s can also input the drop off location with the same method if they face the same predicament.
With Get Current Location ride-hailing companies can deliver the same customer satisfaction and experience to more remote settlement’s as they would in better connected cities and areas in either developed or developing countries around the world.
Thanks for reading!
If you want to learn more about Get Current Location you can reach out to one of our developers. Want to get started with Roam and integrate our SDK and Get Current Location solution? Sign up to our dashboard! And finally, if you want to learn more about what solutions Roam provides for Ride-hailing check out our Solutions page to get started.