Gomi - Free stuff near you

April 16, 2012 7:45 AM

Gomi - Free stuff near you
You see an abandoned on the city street. You list it. Anyone can claim it. Basically we've developed an app that whenever you see something like a couch, TV, BBQ, etc. that's been dumped on a street corner, you whip out your iPhone and take a picture of it. The item goes onto a big map, so that anyone can browse and get it for free!

Role: Co-founder

posted by tomargue (3 comments total)

This seems like a great idea, and the interface is easy to use. However, I'm pretty sure this app totally killed my iPhone battery today. It looks like it maintains location detection even after it's closed, which I didn't even realize was possible for an iOS app to do. And since location detection drains a battery quickly, simply opening Gomi for a few minutes this morning and then closing it meant it drained all day. Only force-quitting the app made the location detection stop.
posted by scottreynen at 5:24 PM on April 16, 2012

Hi Scottrenen, we've tried to be careful with not using too much background location, i.e. we only update location every 10 minutes. In our next version we'll probably make our background updates more infrequent. Thanks for the feedback!
posted by tomargue at 5:50 PM on April 16, 2012

Goodness, scottreynen, thank you for mentioning that before I downloaded it.

How's about the option to turn off automatic location updates and refresh manually? Data is expensive in Australia, and something that's polling 144 times a day can't be good for data caps.

I agree this seems like a great idea.
posted by Georgina at 6:31 AM on April 25, 2012