Find spaces or bikes near places you go often
If you use Boris Bikes regularly, especially in mornings and evenings, you'll know that sometimes you can’t find a bike at your normal station. Or worse, when you arrive you can’t park it. Near Bykes allows you to add your regularly visited locations to the app, e.g. Home, Work etc. Then when you look at the app, it will show you the state of the docking stations in the area. That way if your favourite dock is empty, you can go straight to the next one, saving yourself valuable minutes.
After quite a few years of keen Boris Bike subscription, I thought that it would be helpful to be able to see whether my local station would have any bikes available; at a glance. Whilst there are ways to find this information on the move, most involve intricate map tapping and multiple steps. This investment of effort is not always desirable.
A few years ago I made this as a (home screen) web-app. It seems that noboby understands that web-apps aren’t in the AppStore, so when React Native came along, this seemed like a good opportunity to try it out! The “App” version allows users to choose their own locations on a map, and save them to their phone. Then using the (now official) TFL API, the app checks the status of the nearest group of stations whenever the app is opened.
