Find nearby venues with wifi and their password

Posted by apas on July 30, 2012 12:41 pm 4

Disclosure before reading: this is about an app I (with help from a friend of mine) made for iOS. It's free and, I think, it's a great utility to use built atop foursquare so I thought of sharing this. Continue reading if you're still interested.

4sqwifi finds nearby venues with wifi and their password. Using foursquare's API and its user-generated tips.

It all started back in January 2011 merely as an idea for the foursquare community: sharing wifi status from places we visited like (mostly) cafes and bars by leaving tips in the format: "This place has wifi and is free." It was doing pretty good. After a few months (Spring '11) during biology class in my high school I figured out this had to be an app. Fast forward to November 2011 (because I had to sit through my high school exams, had summer vacation and then switched countries to study (I'm from Greece - studying Computer Science in Vienna, Austria)) the app went live in the App Store. It was a huge success only with WoM (we still have no ads, marketing, etc) - went #1 overall free app in the GR store, surpassing Angry Birds, Instagram, Facebook for about one and half week and #8 in US productivity category. The story was picked up by TechCrunch, LifeHacker (twice, woohoo!), TNW, a couple newspapers, etc.

What the app does is pretty much really simple - a search algorithm crawling foursquare and displaying only venues which have wifi — and their wifi password. Venues are not homes or private/corporate wifis (although I've seen some colab spaces and startups sharing their pwds tagged for 4sqwifi) but mainly cafes and public spaces.

The app was at first (v1) built with Titanium Appcelerator: pure JavaScript. When Giannis (@decoding) joined, he rewrote the whole app in a weekend in Objective-C (that was awesome) and from then, every version (starting from v2) is fully-native.

Future plans are about monetizing (we're still working on that) 4sqwifi. We've found some ways and got foursquare's approval

It's somewhat strange, but up until now we haven't received a single "legal" (or just "plain old email") complaint from a business owner. People seem to like it, I think.

When the app launched I was lucky enough to be for two weeks in Silicon Valley and SF meeting with some cool people like Chris (@defunkt) from GitHub (who really liked the app), Peter Thiel (gah, yes, indeed!) and there was a general awesome feeling about 4sqwifi from all the people I've met.

Screenshots:

—Here's the App Store link and here's our website.

PS. Credit for helping with 4sqwifi: Gerasimos (@tsiger), Eleni (@pinkmoustache) and Panos (@weird_al). Thanks guys. This wouldn't be there if it were not for you.

tl;dr:

• cool and free iOS utility atop foursquare API with quite interesting background story