Data quality remains the main bottleneck, followed by the discoverability of the new merchants.
Key Metrics
We added 93 verified merchants, which is about the same as last week. Most locations were verified by Rockedf and me, but we also had a significant number of verifications made by the locals.
Most of the new places are located in Brazil, Italy and Germany.
The total number of merchants dropped by 112, mostly due to my re-verification of extremely outdated merchants. It certainly boosted our signal-to-noise ratio.
The average number of days since the last verification dropped from 307 to 272, which is a very significant improvement. In the long run, this metric will become our key data health indicator, but we need to deal with the remaining outliers first.
Extreme Outliers
We still have some ancient places, and it’s our biggest problem. The date of the oldest verification was December 2017 in the end of last week, and now it’s April 2021.
Android App: Background Sync
Background sync is working reliably, and it will be included in the next Android app release. I hope the Web and iOS clients will follow. The app should always show you the latest data as fast as possible, no matter how long you were absent.
What’s Next: Local Activity Notifications
BTC Map doesn’t have any tracking capabilities, which is extremely rare for a modern app. We don’t know how many users we have, and we know nothing about our users. Our server is read-only, which means that we can send you new data if you ask us for it, but we never send any data back to the server.
Most notifications are initiated by the server, but we can’t do it, since we aren’t using Google or Apple notification infrastructure, and we don’t even know where to send those notifications, because the recipient address is user data, and we don’t store user data.
It is also possible to send a notification from the local app itself, so, while we don’t have your private data, the app on your phone can have it and can use it to notify you. If you granted BTC Map your GPS location access, it doesn’t mean our servers have it. In fact, your location will never leave your device, and you can verify it yourself by examining the source code. Since the app can know your location, it can notify you of new merchants nearby, if it finds them during the background sync. That’s what I’ll focus on next week.