A lucky app-enstance: 2 places to complain to

BY DAN GERINGER, Daily News Staff Writer
Posted: October 11, 2012

ALTHOUGH they both aim to give Philadelphians a quick, mobile way to send reports of neighborhood problems to the city department that can best address them, the Nutter administration's Philly 311 mobile app and City Councilman Bobby Henon's CityHall App aren't the same animal.

Like the blue-collar, plain-speaking councilman himself, Henon's CityHall App is the one you'd most like to have a beer with. It's a simple, user-friendly way to take a photo, write a comment, send it off and get a quick response. It's a lean, mean, Bad Neighbor reporting machine.

Your CityHall App report shows up immediately on the smartphones of Henon's five staffers. Some problems are handled quickly as constituent-service requests. Others are sent to the proper city department.

The Philly 311 mobile app, on the other hand, is loaded with so much stuff besides service requests - city news, profiles of bureaucrats, FAQs and estimated response times - that it can be slow to load and respond, and it's confusing.

For example, Philly 311 mobile app tries to track you using a global-positioning system, and gets flummoxed if it can't. Henon's app just wants you to tell him where it hurts. There's no GPS to slow things down.

Henon's CityHall App debuted in April, beating the Philly 311 mobile app's September launch by months, but, unlike Philly 311, which works on all smartphones, Henon's app won't work on Android until November.

The CityHall App was developed in Philadelphia by Henon's web staffer for $9,000. The Philly 311 mobile app cost $20,000 and was developed by PublicStuff, in New York City.

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