Technology

September 21, 2022 · Technology

Engaging with the Next Generation of Tech Innovators

Last weekend HyperTrack had the amazing opportunity to sponsor and mentor HackTheNorth 2022 at the University of Waterloo and work with an amazing organizing team, and work alongside some of the biggest names in tech like Bloomberg, Deloitte, Square, and more to help over 1000 hackers turn their wildest dreams into a reality. We saw hackers working on everything from ways to make sure your housemates keep the Brita full using social psychology and automated voice and text reminders, entire DIY m

By Muiz Chunara, Jared McGriff

May 18, 2022 · Technology

Building Resilience with HyperTrack SDKs

Outages are painful. No one wants to see a blank screen while attempting to access critical services and applications. Unfortunately, that’s what happened last month when thousands of people attempted to reach their favorite streaming services – Hulu, Apple TV, and HBO Max all experienced service disruption. On Thursday April 21st 2022 there was a broad outage that affected many networks. To our alarm, we were also affected by this outage between 2:15 and 3:35 UTC on April 21st, as we see

By Jared McGriff, Alex Kishinevsky

June 24, 2020 · Technology

Impact of iOS13 and iOS14 permissions on background location access

Consumers expect apps to access location while the app is in use in the foreground, be it turn-by-turn navigation, blue dot on the map, or location-based content. Users have different expectations from work apps. Field service management, salesforce automation, gig work, fleet automation, and delivery management apps stay in the background most of the time, while the user is focused on fulfilling work on the field. Business uses high-frequency location for routing orders, tracking progress, shar

By Eugene Tulushev, Jared McGriff

March 16, 2020 · Technology

Evolution of location access on Android

In Sep 2008, Android provided developers with the ability to use GPS location with app users' permission as part of the first Android 1 (API 1). Millions of apps have been built using location-based services in creative ways since then. As more apps started using location in the background, and sending this data to servers for use by applications outside the device, Android  started setting some rules of the game to manage battery drain and user privacy. Beginning with Android 8 (API 26) in Aug

By Denys Soroka, Jared McGriff

July 11, 2019 · Technology

How we built a serverless architecture with AWS

Our customers go serverless for live locations with HyperTrack. They use us as a managed service for live locations. They do not need to build and manage the servers to ingest, process, store, provision and manage anything related to the live location of their app users. Turns out, we practice what we preach! We go serverless for our platform with AWS. For ingesting the data streams from our SDKs, processing them for accuracy, making locations available for real-time features, and persisting d

By Jared McGriff, Thomas Raffetseder

March 22, 2018 · Technology

Movement part 3 — Real-time

This is part three of a ten part series about building movement-aware applications. In the previous parts, we talked about the challenges in generating movement data from the OS and then ensuring accuracy. In this part, we will talk about making movement data available for consumption in real-time. We will talk about use cases that need real-time data and hurdles we need to overcome to deliver that. Introduction Imagine if it took half a minute to generate the receipt for your Uber ride. Both

By Nilesh Trivedi, Jared McGriff

February 26, 2018 · Technology

Movement part 1 — OS

This is part one of a ten part series about building movement-aware applications. Introduction This article is focused on Android and iOS when talking about the evolution from location to movement because they represent 99.7% market share at the time of writing this article. App development, as we know it today, began with the general release of these two Operating Systems to developers in 2008. At first, a few hundred apps were published on the platforms at the time of release. At the start

By Ravi Jain, Jared McGriff

February 15, 2018 · Technology

Movement — Introduction

This is the introduction to a ten part series about building movement-aware applications. Mobility The mobile phone was invented so users could stay connected while on the move. And then mobile phones got smarter and staying connected evolved from voice to apps. App developers used location-based services to be aware of their users’ location and power better app experiences using location. Location-based services The leading Operating Systems provide primitives to get user location as poin

By Kashyap Deorah, Jared McGriff

December 19, 2017 · Technology

HyperLog: Android Remote Logger Library for Debugging

HyperLog, a utility logger library for Android on top of standard Android Log class for debugging purpose. It is not easy to debug live mobile apps or libraries, or create every possible environment in which your end users use your app because of the variety of Android devices and variety of Android versions. It is very difficult to replicate every possible configuration and reproduce every single bug that could possibly occur when millions of users use your app. During mobile app development,

By Ravi Jain, Jared McGriff

July 24, 2017 · Technology

Creating a binding for Swift frameworks in Xamarin

Xamarin is one of the more popular platforms for developers to build apps across platforms. In our goal to make it easy for developers to integrate the HyperTrack SDK into their apps, we were looking to support the Xamarin developer community. This turned out to be harder than we initially thought because Xamarin does not directly support Swift frameworks. We ended up building a binding for our Swift framework in Xamarin.iOS so Xamarin developers could integrate the HyperTrack SDK for iOS. If yo

By Ravi Jain, Jared McGriff

July 23, 2017 · Technology

Practical guide to deploying applications with AWS ECS, ALB, and ASG

If you are new to hosting applications on AWS or considering switching to AWS then this article is for you. An array of AWS services are at play to deploy your production application for the world to use. It gets difficult for a beginner to get a full picture of how these services work together. And it’s overwhelming to sift through all relevant AWS docs. In this post we will specifically talk about EC2 container service (ECS) Application Load Balancer (ALB) Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) and how th

By Amit Rathi, Jared McGriff

June 10, 2017 · Technology

Real-time location tracking with near-zero battery impact

The HyperTrack SDK is active on thousands of devices through 100+ apps across the globe. Users represent all 6 inhabited continents, 2 major smartphone Operating Systems, several tracking use cases and markets, and a variety of network and GPS conditions. We implemented a way for the SDK to record overall battery consumption on the device during the time it was active. This is our first battery benchmarking exercise at a reasonable scale. This goes beyond small scale tests we had done with dozen

By Jared McGriff, Amit Rathi

April 18, 2017 · Technology

The pitfalls of using location streams as an interface for building live location features

Developers build live location features in their product because it is core to their business. In the process they end up having to build infrastructure. Developers who have built and operated this underlying infrastructure on their own have a deeper experience of the pains involved. Often this is the first time they start questioning if that part of the stack is core to their business and if there is an API for that. In the chance that they find HyperTrack as that API they were dreaming of a ne

By Jared McGriff, Kashyap Deorah

February 10, 2017 · Technology

For designers who want to take over the world

This is one of the first websites I ever designed — cookfresh.in. It’s now defunct but in its glory days it was a food delivery business. Back then I wasn’t even a good enough designer to mock up pretty web pages let alone build great products. I taught myself design after someone showed me how to use Photoshop in Industrial Design school. Photoshop served as a gateway drug to learn graphic design and then UI and eventually UX. Getting over the discomfort of using Photoshop’s complex interface

By Vibhas Jain, Jared McGriff

November 28, 2016 · Technology

Battery Efficient Real-Time GPS Tracking

One question we frequently get asked is “How real time is your tracking experience?” When we respond saying it’s near real time (~4 second latency) the follow up is “You must be collecting GPS locations very frequently; what’s the impact on battery life?” The fact is, we only consume ~5% of battery per hour of tracking. So your fully charged phone can last full day of tracking without breaking a sweat. This blog is a deep dive on how we achieved close to real time tracking with minimal battery u

By Amit Rathi, Jared McGriff

November 10, 2016 · Technology

How we ditched HTTP and transitioned to MQTT!

In the field of location tracking, there needs to be lot of back-and-forth communication between devices and the backend. Device transmits location, activity and health data. Then the backend processes this information, applies business logic on top and sends configuration commands back to the devices in order to orchestrate tracking. These configuration commands determine when to start/stop tracking, frequency at which to collect GPS data (time and distance), frequency at which to transmit GPS

By Jared McGriff, Amit Rathi

September 25, 2016 · Technology

Solving true time at HyperTrack

One of the major problems that affects the operation of real-time location tracking is patchy mobile network connectivity. Our users trust our SDKs by plugging them into their apps that are out in the big bad world. We guarantee uninterrupted operation of the app regardless of network connectivity. Our SDKs are built to be offline-first. Collecting and handling location data on the smartphone is resilient against bad network. As a result it is considered to be the source of truth for all data in

By Arjun Attam, Jared McGriff

September 11, 2016 · Technology

Our framework for real-time filtering of location streams

One of the biggest challenges with movement tracking is dealing with volatile quality of smartphone location. Numerous factors affect location accuracy such as: * Quality of GPS receiver * Source of signal (GPS, WiFi, cell tower triangulation) * Environment (weather, skyline, visibility, enclosed spaces, multipath reception) * Device state (low power mode, flight mode, initial fix) Due to the error introduced by all these factors, it becomes essential to carefully process the location stre

By Jared McGriff, Amit Rathi