Three people who live in very different parts of the world, Austin (Texas), Oslo (Norway) and Barcelona, ??are the creators of a success story in the world of applications. On June 5, Apple announced the winners of its application awards during the annual developer conference (WWDC) held in Cupertino. Among them, in the category of winners in interaction was Flighty, a flight tracking app whose founders include the Barcelona computer engineer Francesc Bruguera, who attended Apple Park in Cupertino together with his partners, Markus Aarstad, Norwegian, and Ryan Jones, American, to collect the award.
“The WWDC award was very impressive. We didn’t expect it, because it is one of the most important awards in the world of apps and it was already an honor just to be nominated.” But Flighty appeared as a winner on the big screen in Apple Park. For its founders, the path to here was a small miracle. The founders of Flighty met on Twitter over a problem Jones had with a trip in early 2018. None of the apps he used to check flight status worked for him. The comments on the social network ended up uniting the three casual partners, who decided to build an app from scratch.
“We are three people who love the world of airplanes -explains Bruguera-. We spent two or three years in the beta phase, testing. We have a team of about 20 beta testers who are pilots, flight attendants, people who travel a lot… and They are great for us, because we have feedback from people who know how to travel, who use all the apps and know all the tricks for traveling and that helps us a lot to improve”. Flighty, like all flight tracking apps, cannot be tested at any time, but rather when the user is on a travel day.
If the beginning of this society was already complicated by the physical distance between its members, the circumstances were going to get much more complicated. “First we started looking at what the problems were and how we wanted to improve what was already in the app market. We spent two years thinking about it, until in 2019 we decided that it was time to go out. We launched the app at the end of summer of that year”, says Francesc Bruguer. It was only going to be four months until the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and in a short time world flights were reduced to a minimum.
Bruguera points out that at the beginning “everything was going great. People really liked the app. Everything was going super well and then the news from China began to arrive, flights were cancelled.” But even in the most adverse circumstances ways to progress can be found. “During the pandemic we were helping people who had to travel. There were both people who had canceled flights and those who had to travel for family or work reasons, people from vaccines and many government entities,” he points out.
For this computer engineer graduated from the University of Barcelona (UB), Flighty’s strong point is that it brings together “information from many sites.” “We detect where things are going to go wrong – he explains – and we try to put the information in the simplest way, in such a way that it is not very confusing and allows you to react in some way”. Flighty is available in the Apple ecosystem. Last year, it was one of the first apps that, in autumn, was released with the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro, which collects information from what works in the background on the mobile. In addition, its widget remains giving basic information on the locked screen.
Flighty works by subscription, but you can also use it with as many flights as you like for free and forever. Subscriptions offer highly up-to-date information including not only flight statuses, but also where the plane is, forecasts, the flight path, and when the plane is already in the air and the traveler has (presumably) no data connection , provides the status of the journey. Subscriptions can be annual (€49.99), for people who travel a lot, or monthly (€6.99), for those who only want to use it spontaneously. There is also a lifetime modality (€299) for someone who spends a good part of their time between airports.
