EskomSePush will soon get water outage tracking, fire reporting, and support for adding load-shedding to your smartphone or computer’s calendar.
Developers Hermann Maritz and Dan Southwood-Wells have told sunday newspaper Rapport that these are among the new features they are working on for the popular load-shedding app.
The developers say EskomSePush (ESP) has been downloaded and installed from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store around 6 million times, more than double the 2.2 million installs that Maritz told My Broadband it had racked up by February 2021.
That means in about a year and a half, ESP gained more users than it did in the six years since its launch in 2015.
Daily active users had also jumped from between 1 million and 1.5 million in early 2021 to about 2.8 million during the latest bout of load-shedding, which was South Africa’s longest streak on record and saw the return of stage 6 load-shedding.
Maritz recently Posted a graph on Twitter showing how usage surged on the app during the period.
The enormous success of the app has convinced the developers to turn what they previously saw as a side project with little long-term potential into a permanent venture.
The increased user numbers and activity improve the potential for more revenue from advertisers, while ESP also offers a paid-for subscription for those who want to remove ads.
Both developers recently left their full-time jobs to pour all of their efforts into ESP.
Maritz started working full-time on ESP at the start of 2022, while Southwood-Wells joined in July 2022.
Key to the app’s continued success will be developing features that would justify its existence even if load-shedding ends.
This includes water outage tracking and fire reports, which are at an advanced stage, Maritz told Rapport.
Users can also look forward to having the ability to add load-shedding schedules to their digital calendars — like those offered by Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Samsung — to more efficiently plan their days around load-shedding.
Eskom’s quick switching between load-shedding stages during 2022 also saw ESP receive a new “Upcoming load-shedding” box.
This makes it easier for users to track when power cuts are scheduled for their area without consulting the stage timetable and reconciling it with Eskom and municipal schedules.
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If you have ideas for features that must be added to the app, Maritz is often open to suggestions for updates to the app on his Twitter page.
A beta version of EskomSePush currently in testing features a range of improvements, including a simpler homepage UI and distance indicators in the built-in community chat function AskMyStreet.
Source: My Broadband
