Big news! As announced today at the AT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas, AT&T is opening up access to their location infrastructure as part of a trial program with Veriplace.
Like many tier 1 carriers, AT&T has the ability to remotely locate any AT&T phone (see for example AT&T FamilyMap). AT&T is now making this capability available to third party developers via Veriplace. This more than doubles the number of phones locatable using Veriplace, bringing the total to around 130 million phones.
As noted in the official press release:
"By utilizing the carrier network, Veriplace allows for a background polling solution, enabling developers to write SMS, Web, WAP and IVR applications that can employ location information even when an application is not in use. For example, a customer who signs up for a mobile weather application can give the application permission to send alerts about approaching storms or severe conditions based on the customer’s location, even when the customer may not have the app actively running on the handset. Additionally, utilization of the carrier network allows devices to be located both indoors and outdoors, to varying degrees of accuracy."
Many will be interested to know that this announcement includes AT&T iPhones. iPhone developers no longer need an application running on the phone in order to locate it, which means ever-elusive "background location" is finally available to all iPhone developers. Developers who simply want to remotely locate iPhones can skip the Apple App Store process altogether.
The trial program will launch in the coming weeks for registered Veriplace developers. Visit developer.veriplace.com to get started.
