Henrico to launch new mobile app soon

Henrico County officials hope to launch by March 1 a smartphone app that will provide users access to the same information available on the county’s website, henrico.us. The launch date is pending approval from Apple; the app will be available on both Apple and Android platforms.

Department officials began researching the development of the app last April and were creating it by July, according to Henrico IT department employee Travis Sparrow.

The time it takes to create an app from the ground up varies, he told the Henrico Board of Supervisors during a work session Feb. 12. A team of people can take months to complete the effort if their sole focus is the creation of that app.

“We kind of took it off in our own direction,” he said. “We wanted to do something 100 percent in-house, 100 percent customized. We wanted it to be our own thing, not something that you can go buy off the shelf from ‘ABC app provider’ and plug in your own information.”

Features of the app include information about every service the county offers, each county department and its contact information, all of the addresses and contact information for the major landmarks the county owns and the last 30 videos the county has posted to YouTube.

The menu of the app shown to board members during the work session showed categories for “Services,” “Locations,” “Parks,” “Video” and “Contact.” Under the menu, the app also offers an “Upcoming Events” feature.

The app will be able to send push notifications to its users, if they’ve enabled them, whenever the county issues an alert on its website. Alerts include any closings of county facilities due to weather, as well as storm warnings, road closings due to inclement weather and any information county officials deem immediately important.

App users will be able to live-stream county meetings through it. In the future, department officials hope to add more features.

Henrico Police, Fire and EMS officials would like to add geofencing, for instance – whereby devices in certain geographic boundaries receive information or respond when activated. Geofencing works with a phone’s Global Positioning System, or GPS.

Brookland Supervisor Dan Schmitt would like to add a feature that allows users to pay their county bills, he said.

The county’s IT department will start promoting the app once it launches and is available for download. They will advertise using “over-the-top commercial ads” that will play a 15-second commercial about the new app when users launch any local TV station’s app and certain other phone apps, like The Weather Channel or ESPN.

The app does not use location services, and only users who have downloaded the app and enabled notifications will receive them. A person who has downloaded the app and travels outside of the county still will receive alerts and notifications.

Department officials began beta-testing their app in December – a process through which they released it to a small number of users in order to work out any kinks and identify any glaring holes or trouble spots.