Congy
p/congy
App for reading in-car at traffic stops during congestion
Adrian Toşcă

Congy — App for reading in-car at traffic stops during congestion

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Adrian Toşcă
Hi, Adrian, maker of this android app here. I made this App as I was finding myself fiddling with the pone at every car stop trying to switch between Waze and feedly and then back. I live in Bucharest, a traffic intensive city and during daily car commute I increasingly begin to use the idle time at traffic stops to read a few news on feedly but also needed to switch back to Waze to find the best route. As I find it annoying to manually switch between the two apps, and being a life long software developer, I thought to use the GPS device information to automatically switch between the two apps, based on car speed. Using the app, I found that I could use feedly for a quick read for about half of the daily commute time, so I won almost 30 minutes of (fragmented) reading a day :). I might be the only user of this app for now but maybe someone else will find it useful. I'd love to get feedback and I will be happy to answer any questions!
Emily Hodgins
@adriantosca hi Adrian. Interesting concept although for some countries (I'm in the UK) this might struggle to be legal. You can get stopped and ticketed for reading a text message stopped in traffic for instance. Aside from the legals, what safety measures have you put in place to ensure people are focussed on the road and traffic ahead?
Adrian Toşcă
@ems_hodge I've seen people peeking at their phones for a quick read even when getting some speed, after starting from a traffic stop. This is no good. Congy is actually discouraging this behavior as, after starting from the traffic stop, it switches to map and there is nothing left for peek reading. Do you have any idea to add some specific/additional safety measures? I cannot imagine something else besides maybe a warning message when starting. For the legal part I considered studying the legislation and remove the app from certain countries but this is a huge undertaken, so it is up to the user, the app description includes a explicit warning about this. Do you think there is something more I could (fairly easy) do? Thank you for your feedback! I really appreciate it.
Emily Hodgins
@adriantosca I'm not sure about advice for all countries, but for UK I think people would get in trouble using this app, even in congestion. There has been a huge crack down on people using phones behind the wheel - even when stopped at lights, or heavy traffic. I don't think there's an easy fix per se - as you mentioned knowing the legals for every country is a huge undertaking! Maybe you could try and crowdsource advice? Safety first is the number 1 thing when behind the wheel so thinking through the safety features and legality is likely going to be your biggest challenge.
Brian Lee
@adriantosca Could be wrong, but this is also not legal in most parts of the US if you're driving regardless of traffic. We also have podcasts and audiobooks as substitutes. Maybe this will change with autonomous cars
Sean D. Emory
Interesting use case.
Joey Sewilo
Why don't you just listen to a podcast