“Captain Jonathan J. Springer reached into his own pockets to produce the $26,000 needed to develop a new iPhone app, one specifically designed for American soldiers battling the Taliban,” Terrence O’Brien reports for Switched.
“The 31-year-old soldier worked with programmers to bring his idea of a navigation and targeting app to life,” O’Brien reports. “The result, called ‘Tactical Nav,’ should soon be available in the iTunes App Store for $0.99… The app is currently awaiting approval from Apple, but, once it’s approved, Captain Springer may start work on an iPad edition.”
O’Brien reports, “The app allows soldiers to snap photos of waypoints, and plot them on a map. These reference photos and coordinates can then be sent to other units to coordinate attacks and artillery fire. The app can be used not only to direct artillery, but also to call in helicopter support.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Paul G.” for the heads up.]
So, your saying the Taliban can get a signal in a cave but I can’t get one in my home in Orange County?!?!?
$26K is outrageous? How do you know? If it’s a pretty simple app, it’s a fair price. But iOS apps of any complexity at all take months to develop and requires expenses for design, QA, and testing. An app doesn’t have to be complicated to take over $100K to develop.
If you think that’s high, I humbly recommend that you shut up and go to write your own app.
So if apple approved this app they support war and killing of people? would be funny since this app could potentially be very offence to allot of people, just like the manhattan app. I don’t like the Taliban fighters either but apple us walking a very fine line here. This is an all made for killing people.
This soldier needs to rethink his distribution idea. He wants the military to use it. He needs to buy the phones, load the ap, then re-sell the phones to the military for $9873.23 each as a pre-loaded nav device. It would get approved by the military much faster that way. And as a bonus, he can include a $756.98 hammer as an emergency destruction utility device as well.
@Richie
Dude, too funny!
Most of the enemy try to severely restrict their cell phone use because they know we can track them. Next, this app is not intended as a stand alone item – it’s designed to work with and provide information to the IT systems behind the front line – which I would assume the enemy does not have – THUS, they cannot profit from it very easily. Finally, it would be fairly easy to design an app that required some form of authentication – so if an iOS device is lost, stolen, or captured, it would be rendered useless to the enemy, and make this app useless to them as well.
The military is well ahead of all your questions… please move along in an orderly manner.
@Milint
What? Talibanis can call artillery and helicopter strikes? Oh, shit …
Hold on … talibanis have iPhone 4?
Then … just run Find MyPhone … and problem solved!
On the other hand >$500B US military budget and soldiers put own $26K to get talibanis. WTF is happening in the US?