About
Why we built Onvas
It started with a bike group and a phone that would not stop buzzing.
Onvas started because a group of us kept losing each other on bike rides, and the fix was always the same bad fix: everybody gets their phone out.
The phone tree problem
Every group ride has the same twenty minutes. Somebody leaves late. Somebody takes a wrong turn. Somebody stops for coffee and the rest roll on without them.
Then the texts start. Where are you? Where is everyone? Are you still on the trail? One person answers, four people ask again, and now five riders are looking at a screen instead of the road.
That is a phone tree. It does not scale past about four people, and it asks the wrong thing of somebody who is moving.
What Onvas does
Onvas is a shared live map for one event, on one date, at one time. Everyone who joined sees where everyone else is. The chat sits in the same place, so the question and the answer live together instead of scattered across four group texts.
Miss the start and you are not stuck. Open the map, see where the group actually got to, and go meet them. No calling around, no guessing, you just ride to the pins.
Where it is going
The bike group was the first version. The problem was never specific to bikes.
Car meets. Motorcycle rides. A destination wedding where forty people are spread across a town none of them know. A work offsite. Anywhere a group splits up and has to find each other again, the same map does the same job.
So Onvas is becoming something anyone can set up. Your own group, your own event, your own date and time.
About the name
Onvas is Catalan. It means "where are they going".
Say it out loud and it sounds like a question, which is the right shape for an app whose whole job is answering one.
Where it is today
Onvas is in closed beta on Google Play, being used by a real riding group on real routes. That is the fastest way to find out what breaks.
If you want to know when it opens up, leave your email and that is the only time you will hear from us.