[sharkjacobs]

My phone is littered with apps like these, which seem well designed to address a very specific problem which I don't have very often. The problem is remembering the app's there 3 or 6 or 9 or 18 months later when it would actually be useful to me.

[Affric]

I always think that the goal of apps like these is build userbase and then get acquired, like darksky or waze: the big providers realise they have missed a trick and then it becomes the default.

[tbyehl]

"Needed tens of dollars of rental compute" isn't much of a moat to get acquired instead of copied.

I loath Waze. Its idea of shortcuts are terrible, its search routinely suggests things hundreds of mile away ahead of the match that's nearby, and sometimes I go through an area of intermittent service where it just decides to stop routing without giving a heads-up.

But Waze is so much better at accurately alerting me to police than my Valentine 1 was that I never even bothered mounting it in my latest car. Google supposedly integrates that data for years now but every time I try it comes up short. Google and Apple Maps are better in every other way, but for me at least, that one feature of Waze is a massive moat.

[kelvinjps10]

Why they police alerting feature it's so important for you? Google maps it's almost as good I find anyways.

[projektfu]

His car burns cannabis while blasting "Fuck Tha Police" at 10,000W.

[tbyehl]

Nonono, despite my outward white appearance, I follow the sage wisdom of Chris Rock[0]. It's so I have enough advance notice to blast "Fuck the Fire Department" so we can share a nice laugh at the historic rivalry between LE / FD.

[0] How Not To Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8