Google’s Parking Spot App Forgets Something Important

There isn’t any shortage of smartphone apps to solve everyday issues that you may have previously come to accept as an everyday irritation.  We’ve seen apps to help find new places, decide which ones to go to, and even apps to help you find your car when you’re done there.  Now Google is hoping to make finding a parking spot easier for everyone.

Keeping in line with the tradition of launching great apps exclusive for the Android platform, Google has released and app called Open Spot.  The idea behind Open Spot is that once you leave a parking spot, you open the app and mark it as open.  Pretty simple idea.  The idea will then show others in the area that a parking spot was recently marked as open, and show how long the spot has been open for.  After 20 minutes, the open spots will disappear from the map. {Mashable}

The problem with the the app is that the only way for a parking spot to leave the map is if it was vacated more than 20 minutes ago.  There is no way for anyone to mark that spot as taken.  If you happen to be in a city with heavy Android usage, it could some frustration to find that the great spot showing as available was actually snapped up by another smartphone user.  The fact that there aren’t nearly as many smartphones out there as Google would like (let alone Android phones) though, means there’s a good chance nobody else, or at least very few people in your area would be using the app to mark open parking spots to start with.

It’s a great idea, and we’re sure it’s incredibly useful around Google’s campus, but this  doesn’t seem like something that’ll be as useful as Google might think.