Introducing Jungle!

This is a momentus occassion for anyone who knows me. I’m officially releasing Jungle, the transit meetup app.

You can try it out

Jungle helps you find cool new places to meet up with your friends by taking the nearest transit station to each of you and finding things to do in range of everyone.

How do you use it?

Once you select your city (London, New York, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur supported at launch), you put in the transit station nearest to each person you want to meet up with. Then hit search and Jungle will show you the best meetup stations, and things to do once you get there. You can also add categories to filter what you want to do. If you add multiple it shows you places that match all those categories (e.g indian AND vegetarian). You can also hold and press a category to negate it. (e.g vegetarian and NOT falafel).

Jungle has an offline estimate of how long it takes to get from one place to another using the public transit system. These estimates are based on weekdays so take them with a grain of salt. But on the plus side this is how Jungle works offline. Jungle also saves some of the business data offline for up to 24 hours, so you can quite happily do searches without any internet.

For the cities added so far Jungle mainly only uses the main metro rail system, not commuter rail or buses. So in London this means no national rail, and in New York it means no PATH, LIRR, or Metro North. But I am working on bringing these into Jungle soon!

The History of Jungle

I’ve been working on Jungle on and off in my evenings and weekends for over 3 years, and I meant to release it early in 2018, but life always seemed to get in the way.
Jungle was originally based on an idea I had for an application to help people find and form hobby groups in their area. Like university societies, but for non students.

At first I came up with the name Tribe (as in find your Tribe), only to discover that the name Tribe was taken by a version of Snapchat where you only have 10 friends.
(This app pivoted when they found out that their main target audience was stoners posting videos of themselves smoking weed https://youtu.be/qYXzTUxtysI?t=68).
That app has now folded.
Here’s a logo and some mock screens using the old name and colour scheme.

Back in 2017 I was looking to join a choir again with a friend who I used to sing with at university. However he worked way out in far west London and I worked in east London, so finding somewhere in range of both of us was a challenge. We ended up joining a community choir in Wimbledon. This was the end of Tribe and the beginning of Jungle, with a new focus on intersection search.

What tech is used in Jungle?

Jungle has been my main side project for a long time so it’s often been an excuse to learn new tech as well as building something cool. I’m going to write a whole seperate blog post about the tech in Jungle but a brief summary is

  • Typescript. Almost everything is written in Typescript, the UI, the data generation scripts, some of the backend services.
  • React Native. Allows for the same codebase to generate platform specific UI components. (e.g same code displays a native Google Map / Apple maps on each platform, instead of a web version).
  • React Native Web. Allows the React Native code to display in the web browser.
  • NodeJS. Backend services and data generation scripts.
  • Go. Go is used for some of the newer services (such as location request sharing).

What’s next for Jungle?

I’ve spent so long trying to polish the minimum number of features for Jungle to feel like a MVP (minimum viable product), that I’ve been delaying loads of feature ideas.

A big one will be signing up with a user account so you can more easily request your friends nearest stations, and being able to save favourite stations (such as you or your friends home / work stations).

Adding some bus routes, commuter / intercity rail, and perhaps even an option for cycling somehow, is on the agenda.

I’m planning on gradually adding more place listings for fun activities like pub quizes, street food markets, open mics, choirs, classes, sports clubs, you name it.

Adding more features for societies, activities and hobby groups is major goal, as this was the impetuous for creating Jungle in the first place.

And adding more cities! So if your city has a public transport system at all, it’s a candidate for being added to Jungle! Please submit any begging for Jungle to come to your city to help@jungleapp.co.uk

So what are you waiting for? Go explore your Jungle!