A feature nobody owns.
In 2015 Uber handed drivers in Seattle a light strip for the windshield. You picked a color in the app, the car glowed that color, and you could hold up your phone in the same color so your driver could pick you out of a crowd. It was called SPOT, then Beacon. Lyft shipped its own version, the Amp.
The hardware is gone. Uber stopped making Beacon in December 2023 and Lyft paused the Amp. A software version still lives inside the Uber app as Spotlight, but it only works there: six colors, one app, one company's drivers.
I kept wanting it for every other ride. Grab, Bolt, a taxi at the airport, a friend circling the block. So I built it as its own thing. No integration, no partnership, no product team to convince.
Flare is a screen that glows and one line of text a driver can read in two seconds. That constraint is the whole point: a feature that needs a company to adopt it dies when that company loses interest. A feature that is just your phone works tonight.
- Web appRuns offline, nothing to install, works on any phone
- Android buildMaximum brightness, true full screen, motion sensors, haptics
- Eight light stylesEach one written as a GLSL shader, not a video loop
- Four gesturesDouble-tap, swipe, wave and shake, read from the accelerometer
- This pageNinety phones in WebGL, type measured and set with Pretext