Using Location Based Tools for App Development - Dom's Tech, Gaming Hardware, & Peripherals Blog

There are a ton of tools available for app developers in today’s market. Some of them can be quite helpful depending on what you want to do with your app. Today, I am going to take a look at Radar and a few of their offerings. Radar is a location platform for mobile apps

What is a Location Platform?

First of all, you might be wondering what a location platform is. Generally, a location platform helps you as the developer determine the location of the user. So, say you are writing an app for Starbucks, it would be helpful to know if the user is in your store using the GPS on the phone. If you knew the user was in your store, you could do things with your app such as offer coupons, show current in-store deals, etc. As you can imagine, there are a lot of applications and benefits to knowing the location of the user. Other examples of apps that use location services in their app are Runkeeper that tracks your runs and Waze that helps you avoid traffic.

What does Radar Do?

Radar provides tools that help app developers add location tracking and context to their apps. App developers can use the iOS and Android toolkits to add these capabilities to their apps in just a few lines of code. Building GPS user tracking capabilities from scratch can take weeks or months, but integrating Radar is relatively quick.

This could be a big benefit to both a big company or a small business. Being able to target your customer with the right message at the right time can make a big difference when it comes to generating sales.

The Radar tool could be really handy if you need or want to use location services at all in your app. There is also a free option for smaller apps if you want to check it out before committing any money.

Have you tried this tool? If so, let me know what you think in the comments.