I have a few qualms with this app:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

You can do that if you want. Most airlines issue PDF boarding passes and both iOS and Android can store and show those files.

Apple Wallet (and Apple Pay) are actually one of my favorite smartphone features. The built-in Wallet (speaking for iOS here) has a few advantages over a folder of PDFs:

- The QR code is always fairly big without having to pan and zoom a PDF file

- The display brightness is automatically increased to make reading the QR code easier

- The Wallet syncs with my Apple Watch (where passes use a different, optimized layout) giving me backup if something where to happen to my phone during boarding

- Passes can be updated by the airline (e.g. gate changes)

- Passes automatically expire, I don’t have to cleanup myself. (There’s archive in case I need an old one)

- Passes can be shown on your lock screen during the boarding time for easier access

- Passes can be multilingual, adapting to your phone’s language

The wallet allows activation by proximity like RFID. So if the pass is in the wallet you don't need to go digging around for wherever the PDF is stored in the phone. Tap, the pass is requested, the pass responds, go.

Can a PDF automatically update with gate changes and delays?

You’re already at the airport. Just look around, stop staring at the phone.

Until two years ago, I flew out of ATL - the busiest airport in the US. Am I suppose to look on the board and look for my flight out of the hundreds of flights to see if anything has changed and keep looking every 30 minutes?

If I’m sitting at a restaurant or a bar I should get up every 20 minutes to see if something has changed?

Should I also print out MapQuest directions before I go somewhere and wait for the paper boy to deliver the newspaper to get the news?

And it’s literally a mile from one end of the airport to the other. Is it somehow better to look on a board than just look on a phone?

And then you also get notifications when the flight changes so drastically that I need to completely change my flight plans. Just this past weekend we were suppose to fly MCO - MSP - LAS and flight changes meant we were going to misd our layover.

Luckily we were notified as soon as the change happen and we were able to make a change to MCO - ATL - LAS and get two of the last seats.

The same happen on the way back. It was LAS - MSP - MCO and we were able to change it to LAS - LAX - MCO.

Things always change when you fly a lot. The sooner you know about those changes the better.

> Until two years ago, I flew out of ATL - the busiest airport in the US. Am I suppose to look on the board and look for my flight out of the hundreds of flights to see if anything has changed and keep looking every 30 minutes?

That’s what I usually do. It’s not that much of an effort to look at the screen right at the gate you’re sitting at to confirm that nothing has changed. I‘ve been to ATL twice, it’s not that bad.

What are you going to do when something happens to your phone …

Can you imagine… how did we manage to live before everyone and their dog had a phone in their pocket.

So yeah… yeah? That’s exactly what you supposed to be doing.

> That’s what I usually do. It’s not that much of an effort to look at the screen right at the gate you’re sitting at to confirm that nothing has changed. I‘ve been to ATL twice, it’s not that bad.

And you somehow think that’s more efficient? Do you also think polling is more efficient than web hooks and push notifications? Why would I do that?

And the restaurants are usually not right at the gate you’re sitting at. Well in our case we are usually sitting in the lounge…

> What are you going to do when something happens to your phone

Well, I personally would take out my cellular equipped iPad on the rare occasions that I was flying by myself and I would still get text notifications on my cellular equipped watch or depend on my wife having her phone, cellular equipped iPad or Watch.

If all that failed yes I would have to get a paper ticket - which you can do at the gate.

How often do you actually fly? My wife and I have been flying over a dozen times a year post Covid.

I was in ATL either flying in, out or through ATL over 25x last year alone.

> Can you imagine… how did we manage to live before everyone and their dog had a phone in their pocket.

I personally had my first phone in my pocket in 1995. Never once in 30 years has anything “happened to my phone”.

What is there to be more efficient? You’re sitting there waiting for a flight. This isn’t a shopping mall, even if it appears to look like one.

Re push vs pull… which one do you prefer more? Kafka or MQTT? On a more serious note… pull because I don’t sit snd stare at the phone all the time. Phone stays in the pocket. So the act of taking it out of the pocket is a pull action.

There are no screens and announcements at the lounge? You went to the airport to fly somewhere, not shopping or a dinner for two, no? What’s more important than getting to your destination?

> What is there to be more efficient? You’re sitting there waiting for a flight. This isn’t a shopping mall, even if it appears to look like one.

That’s just it, even if I didn’t have lounge access, I would be hanging out at a restaurant or a bar that isn’t near the gate. I would have to be constantly looking on the board with all of the flights. ATL has 192 gates spread across seven concourses and two terminals.

> pull because I don’t sit snd stare at the phone all the time. Phone stays in the pocket

Of course I have an alarm set for when I need to start heading toward my gate. But gate changes and when it’s time to board are both push notifications to both my phone and my watch.

> There are no screens and announcements at the lounge

2100 flights take off per day from ATL. That’s over 100 flights an hour - I think there are at least 6 hours a day where no flights take off. They explicitly say they don’t make announcements.

This goes back to do you really want to be searching for your flight on a board with that many flights?

> You went to the airport to fly somewhere, not shopping or a dinner for two, no

If you either get to the airport early to avoid rush hour or have a long layover, you probably will end up having a meal or drinks while you wait. We had a four hour layover at LAX last week.

I think it was Kyiv's airport (so I can't check) but their flight times were not all rounded to the nearest 10 minutes.

I liked this, as finding the single 12:34 flight was much quicker than looking at the 4+ flights all with "12:30" at another airport, where on the display each line is rotating between multiple flight numbers, airlines and languages.

Personally, even if I'm using an app I still look at the screens to check. A notification might not have been sent, or my phone might have dropped off the airport wifi leaving me with no connection, or roaming might have stopped working.

I really don't get why you're being so hostile here. If you don't want to rely on modern conveniences, don't. There's no reason to get up in arms that some of us think that other ways can be easier.

I want to offer a counter point to all these Luddites:

I'm mentally handicapped (my mind is apparently somewhere on a spectrum) and technology allows me to limit human interaction- which causes me physical discomfort. I realise normal people love to talk to the lady at McDonald's, they probably live for that shit.

> What are you going to do when something happens to your phone

Uh... look at the big departures board, duh. I don't see why it's weird to want to use an indisputably more convenient method (auto-updating pass on my phone) for the common case, but still be able to fall back to a less-convenient method (departures board) if the uncommon case comes up.

And no big deal if I need a paper boarding pass. I can just walk over to the gate, show them my ID, and ask them to print me one.

Why is the old way better? That's just a default bias.

I didn’t say it’s better. I only said “take your nose out of the phone and look around”.

> Why do iOS and Android phones have a "wallet", and why a boarding pass would have anything to do with it?

It's not that deep, just a skeuomorphic name for somewhere where you'd keep importants/valuables for quick access, credit/debit cards, boarding passes, concert tickets

Not unlike keeping a folded up copy of a pass in a physical wallet (Which may not be universal, but I would have guessed not that uncommon either)

And if your phone is out of order? I used a PDF version of the boarding pass on my laptop in the past due to a flat phone. Even when my phone is available I still just use the PDF version that was emailed to me. I never use my phone 'wallet' for anything.

If on hand, a smart watch also does the trick

Since I use my phone to pay for things, book rides between places and basically existing in general I also keep a power bank on my person and a spare phone in my house

But if I'm not confident on availability I also keep alternatives, I've not used physical money in months (Other than local bus fares), but I do keep some cash on my person, as well as the physical cards that I use virtually on my phone and copies of boarding passes when necessary, not that I've needed any of them recently, I just like covering my bases, it's not a binary situation, I'd also like to keep spares if my only copy was physical

In the unlikely event my phone dies (hasn’t ever happened in 20 years of having phones) then I’ll go to the desk and ask them to print a boarding pass.

You can do all those things if you want. Download the PDF to your laptop, add the pass to your phone's wallet, even print out a backup copy if you want. And then when you get to the airport, use whichever is most convenient for you.

I generally just get the mobile pass and put it in Google Wallet. If I ever run into a situation where my phone is lost/broken/battery-drained, I'll just go up to the check-in desk or a kiosk and get my boarding pass printed. No big deal.