Project Name: Luogo: Secure & Simple Group Location Sharing
Name of the organization or individual submitting the proposal:
Luke McCarthy
Describe your project.
Luogo is a group location sharing app akin to Life360 or OwnTracks but with the primary focus being ease of use and data privacy. It will allow you to create groups, invite people to them, and get real time information of where your friends or family are on an interactive map. All while respecting the user’s privacy by utilizing the S5 network.
Who benefits from your project?
Current market implementations of group location sharing either mine your data and sell it, or are rather obtuse even for highly technical individuals. Thus, creating an app based on pre-existing S5 tech will allow anyone to securely share their location with friends without the hassle.
How does the project serve the Foundation’s mission of user-owned data?
The goal of this project is to get people to move from apps like Life360 to Luogo, an app that keeps your location data encrypted in transit, and stored locally on your device away from prying eyes. That inherently follows the mission of user-owned data.
We cannot provide grants to residents of jurisdictions under increased FATF monitoring, those that have active OFAC sanctions, or those that fail our bank compliance tests. We also cannot provide grants if your payment bank account is located in those same locations. Please review the following list.
Are you a resident of any jurisdiction on that list? No
Will your payment bank account be located in any jurisdiction on that list? No
Amount of money requested and justification with a reasonable breakdown of expenses:
15,000 USD in salary over the course of 3 months ($5,000/mo). Paid monthly after task completion.
Milestone 1 (By End of June, 2025):
- Create
s5_messengerpackage based on previous grant’s work. Will allow for out of the box inter-client messaging with an S5 node as a middleman. This requires a untangling a good amount of code from the Vup Chat codebase, and will take most of the month. - Begin work on Luogo app.
Milestones 2 (By End of July 2025):
- Complete a MVP Luogo app that allows the user to easily create groups, invite other users by both QR & link, and function as a background service.
Milestones 3 (By End of August 2025):
- Continue to polish the app by adding features like uploading a profile picture, tweakable polling intervals, and geofence notifications (e.g. notify you if a friend is 5 minuets away from your house for example).
- Publish, at least in beta, to both the iOS app store & Google Play Store.
Potential risks that will affect the outcome of the project:
After last years experience with Vup Chat, this project is significantly scaled down in scope in contrast to that project. This time around, the important code to build upon already exists (so I don’t have to wait to build core features), and there are simply less features in a location sharing app in contrast to a inter-protocol, multi-device, messaging app.
But even with that considered, there are always possibilities of things going astray. Possible culprits could be running into technical issues that are more complex than I thought, like getting background services to work properly (which is a known pain point on iOS). Or application store approval which can sometimes be an issue.
Will all of your project’s code be open-source?
Yes
Leave a link where code will be accessible for review.
Do you agree to submit monthly progress reports?
Yes
Email: [email protected]
Any other preferred contact methods:*
- Matrix: @covalent:jptr.tech
- Discord: covalent1