Last week, Real Change became the first street paper in the world to offer cashless payment for a digital version of our award-winning newspaper. Right now, you can download the Real Change app for Android from Google Play to install on your phone. The iPhone version will be available very soon.
The Real Change app is a solution to two of the biggest barriers our vendors have to reaching more readers.
The first is that more and more of us seldom carry cash. The other is that for many, the idea of a physical newspaper itself feels a little outdated. We now get much of our news digitally. People want the convenience of reading the paper on their phones whenever they like.
Buying the paper electronically is now incredibly fast and easy. Tap the app, scan the QR code on your vendor’s badge, press pay and then download Real Change to view in your favorite e-reader.
The whole transaction takes a matter of seconds and is every bit as secure as downloading a song from iTunes. That’s what the $2.99 gets you: the convenience of cashless purchase and impeccable security for your personal information.
And you still get to talk to and support your favorite vendor when you buy the paper.
If you prefer to buy the newsprint version for $2, that’s not going away. The future of street papers is both print and digital, at least as far as we can see. And with the support of our readers, we’re inventing that future right now.
Our amazing team of Google developers who took this on as a volunteer project more than two years ago have created Real Change version 2.0. This is no small thing, and it hasn’t been an entirely smooth process.
Just days before the release, for example, we discovered an issue that shut down the communication between the apps and our database. This brought us face to face with our greatest fear: a release date with major media coverage of two apps that didn’t work.
We persevered. Our volunteer developers rolled up their sleeves and fixed the problem. On April 16, we were able to stand before a crowd of supporters and media in Occidental Park to demonstrate the future of Real Change.
County Councilmember Joe McDermott downloaded the app to his Android, scanned vendor Shelly Cohen’s badge and received a beautiful digital version of Real Change for $2.99. The purchase billed straight to his Google account.
It was the first official electronic purchase of Real Change, and it will be followed by hundreds of thousands more. We’d like to say we anticipate smooth sailing from here moving forward, but that’s not how this stuff works. During the release, we discovered that some Samsung phones have trouble with the app’s memory requirements. Thanks to our amazing volunteers, an updated version that fixes this issue is already available for download at Google Play. We also hit a snag during the Apple approval process, and the iPhone version still isn’t available on iTunes. This, too, will be resolved shortly, and the app will soon be available on both major smartphone platforms.
This is what happens when you pioneer things. Stuff goes wrong. You fix the problems and make it better.
Along the way, we’ll find new find new ways to improve the experience and make it work better for everyone. We hope you will bear with us as we work out the kinks and get the technology working smoothly.
We’d like to offer our huge thanks to everyone who has helped make this possible: The volunteer developers who logged thousands of hours over more than two years of hard work, all of our app testers who have downloaded earlier versions and offered feedback and the early adaptor vendors, who are out there explaining how this works and being patient when it sometimes doesn’t.
Ultimately, this is about much more than the technology. That’s just a tool. We’re creating a new way for people to come together and make the world a better place. That’s worth fixing a problem or two along the way.