Live Tracking

This post is just a heads-up to any who have been following my adventures via the live-tracking service. They are closing up shop as of December 13th. I am trying to work out a replacement, but so far haven't come up with anything workable. If and when I do find something, I will pass on the info as soon as feasible. If you are curious as to why InstaMapper is going away, below is a forum post by their Admin. Stay tuned for more developments.

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Hi all,

Thank you for the (mostly) supportive comments. I will try to answer some of the questions asked here and via email.

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Why is the service closing down?
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There are really a lot of reasons, many of which are show stoppers. In no particular order:

1) We have been losing money for the past 5 years. The model that we had, free service for donations, simply didn't work. If anyone is curious, we averaged about $1 per 1000 active users per month in donations. In other words, the average user actively using the service donated 1/10th of a cent per month. We are still very thankful for the donations that we received. Knowing that someone out there appreciated the service enough to send us money was important, and helped us to keep the service available to this day.

2) Software patents. This is really a topic for a separate discussion. We got accused of patent infringement in 2009. Even though there was no lawsuit, the matter was never fully resolved, and we were reluctant to invest additional resources into InstaMapper going forward.

3) Lack of time. All of us have busy lives, both at work and at home. Closing down the site will free up valuable time.

4) Finally, the service just wasn't growing very much in the past few years.

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Can you offer a paid service?
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This is actually hard. As an example, the minute we start charging for the service, we are no longer allowed to use Google Maps for free. Instead, we would need to buy a business license, which is surprisingly expensive (tens of thousand of dollars per year). There are other choices, such as Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap, but they are not as good, and switching over would require a rewrite of our frontend.

With a paid service, we would also need to hire some full-time employees, to improve service availability and to provide customer service to our users. With these additional expenses, and with our estimates on how much people would be willing to pay for the service and how many users we would have, it is not clear that we would be making any money.

That said, we will continue to consider our options. There is a chance that we will regroup and relaunch the service in one form or another in 2013.

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Will you open source the code?
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I am afraid the answer is likely not. The code is fairly complex -- we ended up writing a custom database for location data, for example. It would take a lot of time to clean everything up and package it into something usable by outsiders. Additionally, the code is valuable to us, and we might still find a use for it later on.

If you need a simple tracking app, writing one from scratch is probably a better option than trying to recycle our code. It should be possible to write a simple Android tracking app in a couple of hundred lines of code. The simplest backend / frontend solution is probably the Google App Engine. github is a good place to host the code, in case some of you decide to collaborate.

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