Trapster

» see trapster.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I carried a smartphone through every year Trapster was alive and never installed it. The app was built around a specific driving culture, the American highway one, where the speed trap is a recognized adversary and warning strangers about it is treated as a small civic duty. Turkish traffic has plenty of enforcement and plenty of opinions about it, but the app never became a thing people here talked about.

Pete Tenereillo shipped it in november 2007, eight months before the App Store existed, while the iPhone still ran third-party software as web pages. The idea was one gesture, digitized. Drivers flash their headlights at oncoming cars to signal a patrol ahead. Trapster asked what that gesture would look like if the range were the whole road network rather than the fifty meters you can see.

So you marked a trap, the mark went on a map, and everyone driving toward it got told. It ran on the BlackBerry and on Java feature phones as readily as on the iPhone, which in 2008 was how you reached people who had a GPS chip but nothing anyone would call a modern handset.

~ the case file ~

~ how it grew ~

The numbers moved fast for a utility with no social layer worth the name. It passed a million users on 20 july 2009 and was over four million by early the following year. By october 2012 the count was past seventeen million, and it reportedly touched twenty-two million registered accounts before the end.

What made it valuable was not the speed traps. It was that millions of phones were voluntarily reporting where they were and how fast they were moving, which is a live traffic feed that costs nothing to collect. Every mapping company in 2010 wanted exactly that and most were paying road crews for a worse version of it.

~ the breach ~

In january 2011 the servers were compromised and a user database was exposed that may have covered more than ten million email addresses with their passwords. Tenereillo's public position was that the passwords were of limited value because nobody treats a speed-trap app as a serious account, which turned out to be exactly wrong about how people reuse passwords.

It did not kill the app. It arrived a month after the acquisition closed and became someone else's incident report, which is its own kind of ending for a project one person started.

~ what really happened ~

Navteq, by then Nokia's mapping arm, bought Trapster in december 2010 for an undisclosed sum. Tenereillo left. Over the following four years Nokia sold the phone business to Microsoft and rebranded Navteq as HERE, and somewhere in that reshuffle it worked out which parts of the location portfolio it meant to keep. Trapster was not one of them.

The notice went up on 1 december 2014. New activations were cut off on 21 december and the service stopped at the end of the month. Tenereillo said afterward that he had spent two years trying to get Nokia to let him run it at no cost to them and had gotten nowhere. Google had bought Waze eighteen months earlier for something near a billion dollars.

~ the long tail ~

Everything Trapster did is now a checkbox inside a navigation app you already have. Waze reports police and Google Maps surfaces the same reports through it. The argument about whether an app should be allowed to do that got had loudly in 2015, after Trapster was already gone, when American police chiefs asked Google to switch the feature off. Google did not.

That fight was Trapster's inheritance and it was not there to see it. The domain trapster.com stopped resolving some time after the closure. The last thing the archive holds is a header bar from christmas 2014, sitting on a site that had already been told to stop.

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