RefugeeBuddy - Android

The RefugeeBuddy helps people to stay visible for their family members and friends, as well as be informed about ongoings in the middle east and Europe.

It is an open source GPS tracker and news aggregator.

The GPS tracker is setup in a way that battery consumption is kept low. It is tried to find a middle way between accuracy and battery lifetime.

The news aggregator is aggregating news from all major and minor news outlets, which have something to do with war news from the middle east, syria, iran, irak, turkey, as well as immigration news from Germany, Austria, Greece, Macedonia, etc.

What does the RefugeeBuddy?

This is an android app which does two things:

it makes it very easy to let friends and family members track a phone and know where you are. it has a dedicated war and refugee news aggregation page to keep refugees informed.

Tracker

Family members and friends are left behind, communication is more than often not very easy. Sometimes weak signals, very low bandwidth or only short availability of signals makes it hard to keep chatting or posting on social networks.

The RefugeeBuddy collects location information and, when a network is available, transfers it to a server, so that friends and family members can see where the person is right now (or was the last time). A link can be shared among friends and family members to keep track of the Phone.

How is that different to all other GPS trackers?

Open Source: This app is open source, in addition to being free of charge. No ads - so far.

Low Battery usage: While other apps try to get the location as accurate as possible, here its more meant for saving some battery life. Block-Level accuracy is more than enough. I let this app run the whole day on my phone without any huge impact on battery life.

No shady things: The source code is openly visible. We don't collect more than necessary. If you feel things should be done in a different way, shoot me an email, make a pull request. I'm happy to change things.

Location Service

Once the link is shared, a browser can be opened and an OpenStreetMap is following the phone automatically.

You can find an example here. The frontend is written in angular and is open source.

Refugee News

The news aggregation is collecting news from all major and minor outlets giving direct access to get a very accurate picture of what is going on right now. It is real-time, automated aggregated news. You can follow news topics or even open in on the computer.

Permissions

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION"/> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION"/>

While the app does not really use the Fine-Location, I have added the permission in order to get the fine location when its needed. If you publish an app in the playstore and add permissions later on, you will need to manually approve the app again in order to receive updates. To avoid that - and for future use - the permission is already added.

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE" />

Those two permissions are pretty self explanatory. The app needs internet access in order to send updates to the server. The app also needs access to the network state in order to know if there is internet access available.

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED" />

This is a good one. Currently the app does not have a settings page, where a user could choose if he wanted to start the tracking server automatically after turning on the phone. I'm planning to integrate this and its also already prepared, but not yet ready.

Translations

The app is currently translated to German, properly, from a native speaker. The arabic translation was made with google-translate, I found it should have at least basic arabic translation to let people better understand what is going on. I would be happy if someone could look through it and eventually provide more translations.

iOS

Currently there is no iOS version of this app. I do not have an iPhone, yet, so, no.

Questions

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at any time. You can either do that by mailing me: thomas [at] newscombinator.com, or chatting with me via the chat-plugin on www.newscombinator.com or open an issue.

Screenshots