One paid Maps call per journey, and a trophy from Google for it

The problem

Highway Delite set out to map what is worth stopping for on India’s highways: food, fuel, rest and sights, with the reliability a driver needs. The founders had the domain knowledge, a catalogue of places in an ageing system, and no engineering team.

The real constraint was not the map. It was the economics. Commercial mapping services charge per question asked, and a road trip is a very long question. An app that looks up every restaurant, fuel stop and hotel along six hundred kilometres of highway costs the company money on every search and keeps the driver waiting on a patchy connection while it does. Get that wrong and the product cannot afford its own users.

What we built

A search that costs the same whatever the distance

The app asks the mapping service one question per journey and answers the rest itself, from the company’s own catalogue, along a narrow corridor either side of the actual route rather than a circle around it. A search along a short city hop and a search across three states cost the business exactly the same.

A catalogue that fills itself in

The first driver down a stretch of road nobody has travelled yet triggers a quiet background look-up, and the answer is kept. Every driver after that is served from the company’s own data, instantly. A given stretch of highway costs the business its look-up once, ever, and no traveller waits for it.

An app built for the phones people actually had

Eight megabytes, running back to versions of Android that were already old, because the audience was buying entry-level handsets and paying for every megabyte they downloaded. Position, distance and nearby searches are worked out on the device rather than asked over the network, and anything captured while out of signal is kept and sent when the signal returns.

The business side

An administration system where staff add and edit highway stops on a map, with its own permissions model, plus the hosting, the release process, and a way to pause a bad release or post a notice without waiting on the app store. The engagement included a stint as interim chief technology officer and a pitch to a venture panel under the state startup policy.

The hard part

A safeguard that shipped in the same month as the award tells you what the project was really about. If the mapping service ever answered unexpectedly, the system stopped asking, told a human exactly what it had seen, and carried on serving what it already knew. An empty stretch of highway is a legitimate answer, not a failure. A startup on a fixed budget cannot afford a runaway bill from a service it does not control, so the design’s last resort is always to degrade quietly rather than to keep spending.

What it changed

The app reached fifty thousand users within six months of launch and held a 4.7 rating, on an eight-megabyte build that ran on the cheap phones the audience actually owned, through forty-nine releases shipped by one engineer in nine months.

In March 2016 Google named the work Maps Master, with a Pegman trophy and a tablet, for the way the first version used its mapping platform. The company continued on the platform after the engagement ended and has since taken the product in a different direction, towards fastag, insurance and payments; the store reviews today are mostly about those services rather than the road.