How a lean team made the switch in midstream
By: DJ Slaughter
Barkly Pets uses customized, live-updating maps to give dogs (and their owners) a personalized dog-walking experience. Pet owners in Washington, DC, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore can use Barkly Pets to find and schedule walks for their dogs with expertly trained pet care professionals. With steady user growth and a ballooning network of dog walkers, the startup was looking for a more flexible mapping services provider.
We weren’t thrilled with the pricing structure or the product customization options of our previous provider, so we migrated to Mapbox because it’s a really developer-friendly platform.
Changing map themes is a breeze — I can do it with just one line of code. We’re a small team, so having the location services and map customization taken care of freed up our time to focus on providing users with a personalized dog-walking experience. -Jim Camut, Cofounder and Technical lead at Barkly Pets
Maps in the app
The app contains two map-based interfaces: one view allows users to schedule walks and check in on their pup during and after the walk; and the second view, designed for dog walkers, alerts them to new walks, routes them to their next pick-up, and helps them navigate during their walks.
Making the migration
The team first updated their maps on the web using GL JS, our web API. It can be daunting to switch Map APIs when you already have an established product, but it was a smooth transition. Jim (the sole developer at the time) was able to make the switch to our APIs and launch the product within one week.
As a developer, I know how painstaking it is to provide documentation. The examples Mapbox provided were everything we needed — we didn’t need to reach out to the Mapbox support team at all during the switch.
After having success with GL JS, Jim dug into the rest of our stack, using our Maps SDK for React to reduce development cycle times between iOS and Android builds, and our geocoding API to build out in-app search.
What’s next?
Jim and team are considering adding some helpful features to the app’s dog-walker view.
Looking ahead, we’d like to add turn-by-turn navigation and optimized routing to our dog walker interface with the Mapbox Navigation SDK and the Optimization API. We’d also like to use Studio to custom-style a “night-mode” map for our dog walkers so they’re not going blind looking at their phone screen as they walk dogs in the dark.
If you’re a small team (or even a single developer) and interested in adding location-based experiences into your app with our developer-friendly APIs and SDKs, drop us a note. We’re here to answer any pricing, integration, and migration questions you have.
P.S. — Live in Barkly Pets service cities? Download the app for iOS or Android and enter the code MAPPING to get a discount.
Barkly Pets shifts map providers to track dog walks was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.