Postcodes are Important!

Jan 3, 2009 • john-mckerrell

I spotted this article about postcodes on the BBC a few days ago. It points out how UK postcodes in their current form have been around for almost 50 years. Postcodes are of course hugely important. Though there have been stories over the years of Royal Mail managing to deliver poorly addressed, or even cryptically addressed items, the fastest and most reliable of getting a letter delivered is to make sure you address it with a postcode. Postcodes are also being used increasingly by personal navigation devices and online mapping services as a really simple and short way of identifying locations.

Considering how important and useful postcodes are, you would think that the post office would want to make it as easy as possible to get hold of information relating to postcodes. On the contrary, while it’s not particularly hard, it is prohibitively expensive. This, of course, is where the Free the Postcode project comes in. As such I’d like everyone reading this blog to make sure in this coming 50th year of postcodes that they submit as many postcodes to Free the Postcode as they can. Hopefully someone will make an Android, J2ME or Symbian app to make this easy, but in the meantime if you have an iPhone then there’s a new version of iFreeThePostcode available to you now.

I’ll talk about the new version in a moment but first I thought I’d mention how successful the app has been so far. My main source for statistics has been iTunes Connect, this is part of iTunes you generally don’t see. This is what I used to upload the app originally and setup my contracts. Apple also provide some basic sales data which can be downloaded in tab separated files. When I added the app I was able to choose what stores to make it available in but I decided not to limit it, so that visitors to the UK would still be able to help if they wanted to. Using the files I’ve found these are the top 5 countries that have downloaded the app:

GB	1683
US	535
CA	77
FR	69
IT	66
Others	684
Total	3114

With so many people downloading the app you might think we’d had huge numbers of submissions to freethepostcode.org. Maybe 2 per person, home and work? Or at least 1 per UK person to download? Well, while that hasn’t been the case, I’ve found that over the past month and a half since the app was released, nearly 50% of postcodes submitted to freethepostcode.org have come from my app. A few days ago I received the following stats from Dom, the administrator of freethepostcode.org:

In November 307 out of 1723 submissions were from iFreeThePostcode. In December 587 out of 1199 submissions were from iFreeThePostcode.

So in December that was 49% of the submissions, and using a little maths I’m guessing at about 59% for the 9 days in November that the app was available. I’m really happy with that, but hopefully with the bugs ironed out, we’ll be able to get that even higher in the coming months. And so onto the new release…

Two days ago the new version of iFreeThePostcode went live on the app store. I’ve noticed a few negative reviews on the App Store saying things like “I tried to click the button to submit and it didn’t work, 1 star!” It seems that my existing way of telling you that the accuracy of your location wasn’t high enough was a little too subtle. Originally I set the button status to disabled, all this seems to do though is change the text colour from blue to black, not the most obvious change. I also colour the accuracy label red or green depending on whether it’s accurate enough.

The new version replaces the overly subtle “disabled” button with a label when the accuracy is not enough, this label also shows when you haven’t submitted a postcode or email address. I’m hoping this label will be clear enough and that people will now try waiting for a more accurate location. It’s a good thing to remember that not everyone installing your app will be a technophile, but then even amongst my techy friends there were people who couldn’t tell why they weren’t able to submit. I’ve also made sure that the app remembers the postcode that you’ve put in. The original version didn’t do this because I wanted to make sure that people didn’t accidentally submit the same postcode in different locations, but I’ve realised that this is unlikely to happen, whereas it’s quite possible that someone might be copying the postcode from an email or a contact, and might want to flick between iFreeThePostcode and another app without the postcode being removed.

If you’ve got an iPhone and have installed the app, please leave some positive feedback on the iTunes page to counteract the negative feedback. If you do have criticisms then contact me directly or leave comments on the blog post and I’ll try to put fixes in the next version. If you own an iPhone and haven’t installed the app, why not?! Head over to the iFreeThePostcode page for more information and for the iTunes link.

Oh yes, final thing to mention, this version is of course open source again, see the above link to download if you’re interested in finding out how it works. Patches welcome!

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Jan 4, 2009 — I’m a Mac?

[...] providing a market place and distribution channel for application developers. John has shared the download stat’s for his FreeThePostcode app…a staggering 3000 downloads in just a couple of months - for an [...]

Jan 5, 2009 — dave

Just a random thought: how useful would street names plus postcodes be as input, as opposed to GPS locations? I mean, being a nerd, I've got all my relatives' and friends' addresses in my Mac's AddressBook, and it wouldn't be difficult to script mass submissions from the Mac. Of course, this gets synced to my iPhone but I have no idea if it's accessible to apps. As long as you've got some way to work back to a rough location (via OpenStreetMap or whatever) then it should provide a pretty good if slightly coarse source. In some cases it's going to be misleading, e.g. very long roads, but then it should be pretty easy to spot very long roads in the OSM data, and even then it'd be better than nothing. In some cases it'll be even more accurate than a single point, I know for example that in my small street every house has the same postcode.

Jan 25, 2009 — James P

Ummm, call me crazy, but doesn't google's geo API geocode UK postcodes? I just tried it then quickly, and it seems to accurately resolve a full postcode quite well. Obviously, you're not going to get incredibly accurate property boundaries or anything, but you're not going to get that anyway with an iPhone app. Probably a lot quicker than doing it by hand, though perhaps not strictly within the Google T's&C's (which I didn't read). Cheers! James P.

Jan 25, 2009 — john

Google's API does resolve postcodes for free but their license is restrictive about what you can do with them. You can't cache them long-term in your database which means an application such as "get me the ten nearest stores to my location" would not be possible if you only have postcodes for the stores. Their docs mention temporary caches but I'm fairly sure that doesn't allow the above usage. Their docs also mention that "the geocoding service may only be used in conjunction with displaying results on a Google map" which means that you couldn't use it with a map from Open Street Map. Also, even though you do get some free access to postcodes with Google's API, the database is still proprietary, what if you don't want to use Google's API, what if you want to do something new and interesting that google's API can't do? The only way to do that would be to pay large amounts of money to the Royal Mail.

Feb 27, 2009 — Tim Morley

I'd love to contribute to a free postcode database, and I've just bought an iPhone, but what I'd like to see -- and haven't found yet -- is a clear description of (a) exactly what is recorded in your database when I submit information via the iPhone app, (b) which of these pieces of information are for publication and which are not, (c) who owns the collected data, and (d) under what license you intend to make the collected data available, and when. If I've missed something obvious, please just post a link. I don't want to sound distrusting -- 'cos I'm not! -- but I'd like to know exactly what I'm contributing to. Thanks in advance.

Feb 27, 2009 — john

Hi Tim, iFreeThePostcode actually submits your data to freethepostcode.org - a website which I don't actually have control over. I do trust the people looking after that site but as it's not my own I can't answer your questions definitively. I think these are correct though: a) Your email address is stored together with the lat, lon and postcode that you submit. An IP address will also show up in the web server logs but I'm not sure if this is specifically stored and for how long. b) The only information which is intended for release is the latitude and longitude and the postcode c) Not entirely sure what the "ownership" would be but.. d) The information is already released under a public domain license, you can get it from freethepostcode.org (link is on the bottom of the page). I believe the email address is stored basically as a way to tie a number of submissions together, so that if someone decided to systematically submit the entire royal mail database, it could be noticed and removed. There is absolutely no intention to use your email address for spam or to sell it.

Feb 27, 2009 — Tim Morley

Thanks for the prompt and clear reply, John. So, donning my tinfoil hat for one second, the worst case scenario as far as privacy is concerned is that the few people who have access to the database at freethepostcode.org would be able to tell that I (or at least my iPhone) was at a particular point at a particular time. I think I can live with that. One further question: how does one create a username and get listed here</a>? Thanks in advance. PS Just submitted my first three postcodes. :o)

Feb 27, 2009 — john

That's correct. Actually I don't know about getting a username listed and had in fact wondered that myself. I've asked the guy who does maintain the site to take a look at these questions. He's quite busy though so he might not be able to respond for a while.

Mar 12, 2009 — iFreeThePostcode | Planet Street Map Mobile

[...] would be using giPhones… and that the McKerrellmeister would write an app for your iPhone 3G which lets you upload postcodes using the iPhone built-in GPS. Check it [...]

Mar 15, 2009 — Dominic Hargreaves

Hi Tim, I maintain freethepostcode.org. Our database stores your email address, the lat/long you submit, the postcode you submit, the date/time of submission, the confirmation string, and confirmed flag. Only the lat/long/postcode is released publically. We store the email address of the submitter so that in the event of problems with a particular submitter, we have some hope of fixing problems.

Apr 8, 2010 — Johny Adams

Google API free does not have a UK license for postcodes hence the accuracy of using Google maps for store Locators is very poor. They also cannot Gecode Ireland, Developers and agency's have awful get rounds which often show US towns instead of UK as only based on the first 4 digits of a postcode. In all, no professional would use Google as there are specialists such as Bing and ViaMichelin would have the full kit available for business's