Updates March 2021

by Josh Willuhn. March 22, 2021

It's spring time in Colorado and that means.... This is the last full month of exclusive beta testing! I can't even explain what it means to me after all the effort I put into making this app and its about to be live.

I've had some ups and downs, more downs than ups some months 😂 but I've made it this far. MOTOrift started as another project, RideData.net and I took it down at one point to restart the project. Reality was that to make a cool app I have to charge for it. I'm not a big corporation or anything I'm a "myself and a few buddies who help me out" size team which is about as far from a corporation as it gets.

It's no secret, app economics work on scale. That fact favors big companies to develop app ideas while making it harder for the small teams. The "free to use" apps need more people to make money and typically have a business model involving data harvesting. While MOTOrift isn't exempt from making money we don't do data harvesting. It's designed to serve a small but dedicated customer base of subscribers instead of serving a bigger group of free users.

I didn't want an app that sells data and MOTOrift doesn't.

Some anonymized data goes back to mapbox which is a third party map provider, but you can opt out easily from the bottom left corner of any in app map screen clicking the I icon will open a telemetry opt out option. Read more about mapbox at mapbox.com or on our privacy policy page

Beyond that your ride telemetry doesn't leave your phone until you sync your data - via "cloud sync" and then it's only stored on our servers, not sold.

The choices I made early on to rely on a small group of dedicated subscribers instead of a large group of average users was very personal. It was a big decision and soon I'll find out whether it was the right decision or not. I'm still convinced it's the best way to deliver this app but of course I'm biased. I appreciate all feedback!

What to expect from here?

The biggest difference to the blog will be more tutorial and help content and these updates will be more focused because development pace is changing.

If you read back through these early blog articles, I ramble and repeat myself. Development isn't always pretty but once it's released there will be fewer massive "overhaul" style updates.

Still, this is just the beginning! Features are always being developed and refined. The goal once launched is one new or very improved feature each month so MOTOrift keeps getting better over time. No promises but that's the goal