Can you carry me back?

There are certain apps I use every day, and, not surprisingly, most of them are from google. While google has its google maps and navigation software, from my experience Waze is the better app and service. As much as I like Waze, I have a small peve about how it works, more specifically, how the favorites feature of it works. Waze can figure out where you live and work based on how many times you keep going and returning to those places and it does a pretty good job when you are looking for companies or businesses by name or even addresses.

What about all the other places that you might visit regularly (or semi-regularly)? How about locations of your co-workers in case you need to pick them up for some event? What about favorite activities for the kid(s)? Prefered hospitals, doctor’s offices? Favorite restaurants? If you have clients, client offices? What about your friend’s houses? Or family?

It would be great if there was an app that lets you store your geographic favorites in categories for easy access and then launch Waze in context to navigate to those locations. This way, pretty much anywhere I’m going, once I’ve at least been there before, or have the latitude and longitude of the location, I can have Waze find the fastest route.

Investigating APIs it seems that Waze has a SDK, but that seems overkill for what we would like to do. Google has a couple more developer tools available for Waze but one of them, the Waze deep links looks like just the ticket.

So, now it’s to pick an app development platform. I’ve been looking at Unity and using their cloud build for some RAD. This might be a nice simple enough app to cut my teeth on.

Finally, while I have been playing with Amazon’s dynamodb for some Alexa based apps, I’d like to see how firebase works with Unity. I doubt I’ll hit past their free tier for this project, even if I complete it and put it out on the google app store.