An Evolution of the Helium App
The People’s Network is the world’s fastest-growing wireless network and we’re just getting started. The Network has expanded to over 52 countries, over 2,200 cities, and over 12,000 Hotspots deployed. A core driver of this growth has been the Helium mobile application, the go-to app to onboard, manage, and interact with your Hotspot.
We’re excited to announce the next evolution of the Helium App, including a new design focused on simplicity and actionability, a new name, and a move to a fully open-source development model.
A Brief History of the Helium App
The Helium team developed the app with a single goal in mind: Make it super easy for any consumer to use a very complicated piece of mining hardware and introduce them to the world of IoT. We knew in order for The People’s Network to be successful, anyone, from crypto enthusiasts to those unfamiliar with tech should be able to join the Network and be incentivized to provide coverage.
We feel confident that we’ve accomplished the first phase of this and are excited to grow larger and faster than ever. In the year since we launched, we’ve had so many great interactions with our customers, investors, technologists, and blockchain enthusiasts about how the app works for them, how they want to use the app, and what we can do better.
As a small team working on the mobile app, we always look to being more effective and scale how we develop the app moving forward. We want to improve the user experience of not just the Helium Hotspot, but any Hotspot joining The People’s Network.
A Brand New Hotspot App
Simplicity
The new Hotspot App will give you a quick overview of how performant your Hotspots are. And if they’re not, you’ll know right away. No more doom scrolling Proof-of-Coverage challenges trying to understand what happened to the Hotspot. Less guessing, more knowing.
We are also enabling users to service their Hotspot in an easier way, especially for those that don’t own the Hotspot, and instead hosting them.
Visualization
Rather than reading about what is happening around your Hotspot, we want to visualize it for you — show you on a map all the Hotspots you’ve interacted with, who you can potentially interact with, and more.
We also want to satisfy your curiosity — how are other Hotspots doing compared to yours? A benefit for both Hosts and the curious owner, the new app will have new features to compare performance and watch Hotspots.
Recommend and Celebrate
More often than not, we hear our hosts and Hotspot owners describe confusion over earnings, challenge success rates, how witnesses work, or why things happen.
We hear you, and we want to make it better. Much better.
The new Hotspot App will include a recommendation engine, where it can take multiple inputs to determine and suggest actionable steps users can take to improve the performance of their Hotspot.
One last thing we want to accomplish is the ability to earn badges for reaching milestones or accomplishing something great (ever witness a challenge more than 30 miles away?). We believe in celebrating the success of The People’s Network with badges and even limited edition swag ✨.
Have Your Say
We’re calling on all HNT holders and Hotspot owners to provide feedback on the current App. We’ve put together a short (honestly) survey in order to gauge the most used current features, what pain points are common, and get some idea of a wishlist going forward. This is your opportunity to have your say and define the next generation of Hotspot App.
Take the Survey
https://forms.gle/ChHrM5RwF92ZW5ki6
Hotspot App is Open Source
A new app direction calls for new contributors. We’re so excited to open source this part of The People’s Network! We’ve seen incredible contributions so far on explorer.helium.com and we can’t wait to see what else our community can do. We hope to debut the new Hotspot App in early 2021.
Want to contribute? Stay tuned for some initial GitHub issues and conversations. Check the progress: GitHub repo.