Your step-by-step guide
By: Tarani Duncan and Langston Smith
It’s hard to miss them. They’re locked to lamp posts, lined up next to store entrances, zipping by you on the sidewalks, parked right in front of the steps down to the subway station (🤦♂️), and often saving your life when you need to travel that awkward distance between walkable and “acceptable-to-drive.”
Vehicles are hitting the streets of cities across the world. Companies like Scoot, Lime, Bird, Grin, Ofo, Skip, JUMP, Mobike, Spin, and Motivate are supplying new urban mobility options that help people get from point A to point B more efficiently and cost-effectively. In building these micro-mobility solutions, they also depend on mapping, search, and navigation tools to power their apps. These location-based tools fuel functionality that allows riders to reserve, locate, or park a vehicle, drivers to pick up and drop off their passengers or deliveries, and all users to view and navigate turn-by-turn directions to get where they need to go.
We’re excited to see all these great new experiences that push the boundaries of what location data can do to build new business models and help people navigate their cities. But none of these apps are maximizing all of the features that are available. So we decided to create the ultimate mobility app, using as many Mapbox products/features as possible. Here’s how we did it.
How to Build the Ultimate Micro-mobility App
The guide includes:
- Tips for how to use our Maps SDKs for Mobile to add features like 3D buildings, custom icons, and heatmaps.
- Instruction on how to build embedded in-app navigation with our Navigation SDK including adding multiple profiles (walking, biking, driving) with a request to our Directions API.
- Training on how to translate coordinates into addresses and POIs with the Geocoding API.
- A guide to customizing the map’s design to infuse your brand, toggle map styles, and display custom layers that show where you can and cannot leave vehicles.
- Additional tools to help your operations teams run more effectively and maintain the business.
- A link to the GitHub repo with all the code so you can play around yourself.
Read the guide: How to Build the Ultimate Micro-mobility App
Build the ultimate micro-mobility app was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.