Flare

Before approaching iMobdev, the client had validated a simple but powerful insight: people traveling alone at night, in unfamiliar cities, or through areas that felt unsafe wanted a way to let trusted people know exactly where they were, in real time, without the friction of a phone call. Existing options were blunt instruments — a static "share my location" link, a generic emergency SOS button, or simply texting a friend "on my way, will call you when I land." None of these gave a continuously updated, visual picture of a journey in progress, and none made it easy to loop in multiple "watchers" at once for a single trip.

The founding team had wireframes and a name, but no working product. Their core pain point was translating a felt need — "I want someone watching over me on this trip" — into a live, dependable mapping experience that worked across transit modes (bus, car, bike, walking) and didn't drain battery or fail silently on subway or spotty rural connections. Every day without a shipped app meant lost ground to word-of-mouth momentum they had already started building through early landing-page signups.

A secondary concern was trust and adoption friction. Asking someone to grant continuous location access and invite friends as "watchers" is a big trust ask, and the team knew a clunky first-run experience or unreliable tracking would kill retention immediately. They needed the onboarding, the "Send Flare" flow, and the live-tracking map to all feel effortless and reassuring rather than clinical or alarming.

On the technical side, the team had no existing codebase, no backend, and no experience standing up real-time location infrastructure at scale, so this was a ground-up build under real time pressure to reach app stores before investor check-ins.

Flare launched on iOS and Android within the planned window and quickly became a genuine daily-use utility rather than a novelty download. Early cohort data showed over 70% of first-time senders returning to send a second Flare within two weeks, and average watcher response time (opening the live map after an invite) came in under 90 seconds. The adaptive location sampling kept battery drain low enough that users routinely tracked multi-hour trips without complaint, and the "Send Flare" flow's median completion time landed under 20 seconds from open to watchers notified. With a stable core experience live, the roadmap now turns toward smarter route-based safety alerts and deeper integration with public transit data.