On Pentecost this year, I released the Mass Finder app on the Android playstore along with the more generic Faith Finder app. Initially the app had about a hundred churches mainly in Bangalore and few others in India. But once the app got released I got requests from different places starting with Sydney, Australia and the Bay Area, California. Checking the search query logs, I found requests from other places including the Philippines and Singapore. To serve our users, the database grew and now we have over 17,000+ churches in 400+ cities in 200+ countries. Most of the common fields are based on the Google places search results including the GPS lat, long co-ordinates, the City, State/Province and Country, the Rating and the number of Reviewers.
If you do a "Find a Church" query, you get a list of nearby churches within a radius of 5-20 kilometers (you can select the range) sorted by proximity and you can click on the Car icon to allow Google maps to take you there (we do not believe in re-inventing the wheel and since G-maps does this job very well, we just allow it to help you get there). If you click on the > link, you get more information about the church, including Address, Contact details and Mass timings. These fields may or may not be present and we are on an ongoing mission to fill in these gaps. Here are the features planned in the upcoming releases:
Many people helped bring this to where it is now, but especially I want to thank my wife and family for their support and encouragement and facilitating me to work on the app. I want to thank my friend Snehan Solomon for his initial contribution to the codebase and Kevin Rodrigues for early testing and feedback, Gideon Santiago for designing a beautiful logo and icon for the app (you can find Gideon's profile and work here: https://gidsant.myportfolio.com/work) and Amanda for sharing lots of data about churches and Mass timings in Bangalore. With the continued collaboration of our growing community of volunteers and helpers, I'm sure we will be able to improve the database and the app and bring many more people closer to God through the Church.
If you do a "Find a Church" query, you get a list of nearby churches within a radius of 5-20 kilometers (you can select the range) sorted by proximity and you can click on the Car icon to allow Google maps to take you there (we do not believe in re-inventing the wheel and since G-maps does this job very well, we just allow it to help you get there). If you click on the > link, you get more information about the church, including Address, Contact details and Mass timings. These fields may or may not be present and we are on an ongoing mission to fill in these gaps. Here are the features planned in the upcoming releases:
- On first use, collect preferences and provide quick help
- Add Adoration and Confession schedules and provide "Find a Confession/Adoration" service
- Provide the days Mass readings text or audio to help users prepare for the Mass and if it is in a different language they can follow the readings this way
- If when a "Find a Church" or "Find a Mass" search is performed, there are no results in the vicinity and the church data is not present, inform the user and provide an option to probe using google to find nearby catholic churches. These may be added to the database after verification
- Enable search of churches at different location from current GPS co-ordinates
- Provide points and badges for volunteer contributors and promote when they earn badges
- Integrate google sign in so that volunteers can just use their google id and not have to remember a separate username/password for their volunteer account
- Provide a language list selection in preferences (currently single language is available)
- Provide church verification and mass schedule verification option and also feature to report inaccuracies and out of date information
Many people helped bring this to where it is now, but especially I want to thank my wife and family for their support and encouragement and facilitating me to work on the app. I want to thank my friend Snehan Solomon for his initial contribution to the codebase and Kevin Rodrigues for early testing and feedback, Gideon Santiago for designing a beautiful logo and icon for the app (you can find Gideon's profile and work here: https://gidsant.myportfolio.com/work) and Amanda for sharing lots of data about churches and Mass timings in Bangalore. With the continued collaboration of our growing community of volunteers and helpers, I'm sure we will be able to improve the database and the app and bring many more people closer to God through the Church.
