A free app that maps where you have phone signal in the Berg (posted with the ad

Hi all,

First, the housekeeping: I asked Chris before posting this, as the forum rules say to, and he was kind enough to say yes. I'm the developer of the app below, so read this as coming from someone with an interest in it.

VE's own article on reporting emergencies says "you may need to climb a nearby peak or high ridge to find reception". Everyone here who has spent time on the escarpment knows a few of those spots. The trouble is that the knowledge lives in people's heads, and the person who needs it at four in the afternoon in bad weather is often not the person who has it.

So I built LastBar. It runs in your pocket while you hike, notes every few minutes whether your phone has signal and how strong it is, and puts that on a map. The readings of everyone who uses it are pooled, anonymously, into one map that shows where a phone works and where it doesn't. With no signal at all, the app still works: it shows the map it already has on the phone and points you to the nearest place where a call has been possible, with the distance, direction, and altitude, for every network and not just your own.

What you should know before you install it:

- It is new, so the map still has many blank spots. It only becomes useful as people carry phones with the app running in the background. One party walking a pass with it records that whole route for everyone after them.
- It is free. There is no account and no sign-in, it doesn't read your number or your contacts, and it uses about 3% of a battery a day. There is a paid Pro version that adds more offline areas and a satellite map; but the signal map and the find-signal part are free and will stay free.
- Android phones build the map. An iPhone can see the map and use it to find signal, but Apple doesn't let an app record signal strength in the background.
- It is no substitute for anything in the rescue article: leaving your route with someone, knowing the emergency numbers, carrying what you need. A phone with no signal is still a phone with no signal. All this does is tell you where the nearest signal was last measured.

I would really value this forum's criticism, since you know these mountains better than I do: whether it is useful up there, what is missing, and where it gets things wrong.

It's at lastbar.online/ (Android and iPhone).

Thanks for reading,
Willem