Ward is an app for emergency situations and preparedness.
It all started when my friend Melcher -who is an ex-military of Dutch army- came up with the idea of an app that have all the shelters, bunkers and safe places for the time of war and emergency.
He shared the idea with me, and some weeks later we decided to build it.
100,000+ locations
We started with the Netherlands for data gathering and entering. And after having ~2500 locations in the database, we launched the app.
Later we got to the top #1 Navigation app, and top 5 apps in the most downloaded apps in the whole NL App Store for many days.
After almost a year and half, now it has 100,000+ locations covering fallout shelters, bunkers, tornado and storm shelters worldwide.
Android App
We’ve been asked by hundreds of people on our social media and support email about an Android app.
I didn’t have experience developing for Android. But with AI coding getting better every day, I thought it’s possible. So, I started and surprisingly only two weeks later we had a full functioning Android app.
As we expected, from the moment we published it, thousands of people installed it. And the best thing for me it was to get way more confidence with Android app building.
Next Steps
There are many possibilities for an app like this. We need to choose wisely.
The next major release we are working on has a new tab named Library. It has two features inside: Emergency kit, and Hazard Guides.
Emergency kit will be a full featured check list of everything needed for preparedness of an emergency situation. and Guides are useful documents, files and videos provided by international and local government agencies.
In parallel I am working on a proactive system to be integrated with the app, which I will write about in the future.