User:Lukeolson24/sandbox

Location Based Apps Location based apps(LBA) are a type of a location-based service. Any application downloaded that asks for your location is a location based app. LBA's are any app that uses location, they can be apps like Google Maps (app) or they can be a mobile app like Pokémon Go. Over the years, apps have been evolving consistently and have added more components to better help the user, in todays environment, apps have become much more reliable on location to make the experience superior to before.

Types of Location Apps

With their being such a wide variety of uses with location in apps, there are many different groups of location based apps. It ranges from entertainment and gaming apps to dating apps where people are trying to find love with people near their area.

Entertainment/ Gaming

Location can be used for many reasons when using an entertainment app and it can enhance the consumers experience greatly. There are many entertainment apps that use location, for example Pokemon Go was a huge hit when it first came out in 2016 because of its use of location and augmented reality throughout the app. The use of location her enhanced the app greatly because it allowed people to travel throughout their community and find new Pokemon to collect. There are other types of apps that may use location better but in the entertainment side, location helps apps greatly.

Navigation

Today, phones always come with navigation apps now with the maps app already downloaded on the device. When it comes to navigation apps, the location of the device is a necessity for getting from one destination to another. When it comes to functions of location for a navigation app, it only has one, it needs to find out where you are and how to get to a location.

Dating

Before dating apps became popular, online dating relied on people saying where they were from and trust that they were being honest. In todays dating world, having your location is viable when using a dating app. Apps used for finding relationships have evolved to needing the consumers location now so that it can find people near their area. Dating apps have become very popular in urban areas today because of the mass amounts of people in the cities and the ease of access to meet people through dating apps. Apps like Tinder (app) and Bumble (app) rely on the location of its consumers to connect people to each other. In addition to having peoples locations and connecting them that way, they rely on urban areas because that is where the majority of their consumers are and people can connect easier in urban areas rather than rural.

Social Media

In addition to all of the apps mentioned earlier, social media apps dominate the mobile world and consumers do not understand how much location is put into social media. The location used in social media is key for people connecting to one another. The developers of these apps utilize the consumers locations through showing what is happening in consumers local areas so more connections can be made with one another. Instagram, Facebook and Twitter take peoples locations and they allow people to connect with their friends and see what is trending in their area and what events each friend is going to that is local. Consumers do not realize how much their locations are being utilized and that is what scares people also and makes them steer away from location based apps.

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