About Petty
Introducing Petty. Petty is a mobile app to help NSW drivers find the closest petrol nearby. Available on iOS and Android, Petty is great for when you're in an unfamiliar area, or when you just want to check the price of petrol at the local service station up the road.
I should state upfront that Petty is only available to download in Australia 🇦🇺, and is only of use to those in the state of New South Wales.
Why Petty
Petty stands out by using the most accurate data, collected by the NSW government, and updated in real time as stations around the state change prices at the pump. Who needs unreliable crowdsourced data that's only updated every fortnight anyway?! It's also available on both major mobile OS platforms.
Features
- Sort by price and distance
- Set preferred type of petrol
- View the location of each station on a map
- Directions to each station through the Maps app
- Available on both iOS and Android
- A clean, modern design.
The ACCC estimates drivers who time their purchases of petrol and choose to buy from the lowest priced retailer can save $10 to $15 per 60-litre tank. (news.com.au, 2017) Petty can help with this, by always keeping you in the loop with up to the minute petrol prices.
Price (or lack thereof)
Petty is free to download, with a single in-app purchase that removes all advertisements and unlocks "premium" mode - meaning Petty will then remember your preferences for sorting by price/distance as well as your preferred petrol type. The iOS version also has an optional tip jar, because that's what the cool kids are doing these days. In the future, I plan to add more premium-only features.
Why ads
Ads aren't exactly great. I don't like ads, and you almost certainly don't like them either. In an ideal world, Petty would be free to download without ads, and hopefully premium mode would be enough to make a small amount of money. It's a side project, and any small amount is nice (I have put quite a bit of time into this), but I don't need it to make money. The simple reason why it has ads is that accessing the price dataset costs me. While I can afford to not make money off of Petty, I can't afford to lose money. If you dislike ads, premium mode will get rid of them. I hope that's a fair solution.
Android version
Petty begun as a iOS project mainly because I wanted to see just how good (or not so good) the NSW government was at providing a data set for devs, and I'm familiar with iOS development. It turns out, the dataset isn't half bad, and is incredibly accurate. The iOS app was probably about 80% complete when I decided to develop Petty for Android. Having never developed an Android app before, it was an interesting challenge and good learning experience. In hindsight, this would've been the perfect project to build with React Native, had the iOS version not been so far along. So between long weeks at work and Uni, the Android version was mostly built on my train rides to and from. Before you ask, it's written in Java and not Kotlin. The Android version isn't perfect and doesn't have the same level of polish as the iOS app, but for my first Android project, I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out.
Petty is the type of app that I could keep adding features to, and I have a pretty good list of ideas (thanks in no small part to the awesome group of beta testers). Now that 1.0 is out the door, you can expect to see updates rolling out over time with new features and additions.
Like the look of Petty? Download it here for free.
Want to get in touch? Reach me on Twitter, or shoot me an email.
