GE13, our app for the general election

For the 13th general election we put out GE13, a free app for Android and the iPhone with three channels, voter tips, election news and polling results, pushed to your phone. It started life as PushMe.

The general election is over. Turnout was almost 85 percent, the highest the country has ever had, and the results came in through the night of the 5th. Since April our GE13 app has been on Google Play and the App Store, and results night was its busiest.

GE13 is free, and it’s a not-for-profit community project from us, in support of a better Malaysia. It has three channels … Voter’s Ed, with practical tips for new voters, GE13 Updates, with the latest news, and GE13 Polling Results for polling day. You pick the channels you want, and new posts get pushed to your phone. When Parliament was dissolved on 3 April, it was on GE13 Updates the same morning.

It started as PushMe

Late last year we did a proof of concept for Maxis where you subscribe to content and it gets pushed to your phone every day … it’s in everything we made last year. In November we designed PushMe for iOS and Android on the same idea. You get a list of channels, some free and some at RM3 a month, My Subscriptions with a count of new posts on each, and a switch for each channel in settings.

With the election coming, PushMe became GE13. It works the same way, but there are only three channels, all free, in a calmer teal and cream. Posts in a channel are grouped by day, you pull down to refresh, and you can share any post.

Under the hood

The pushes go through Urban Airship, which on Android sends them over Google Cloud Messaging. Behind it is our own backend on Heroku, with the list of channels, subscriptions, the messages, push settings and a broadcast for sending a post out. Crittercism catches the crashes, and Google Analytics gives us a real-time view of who’s reading, and where.