Pusher VS react-native-geolocation

Pusher Channels is a real-time notifications service that empowers developers to swiftly integrate real-time functionality, like live notifications and chat, into web and mobile apps using WebSockets. Pusher is known for reliability and scalability and is used by Buffer, GitHub, and Datadog.

Pusher

Typically, you don't do websockets. There are some great products out there that give you the same capabilities. I recently started working with Pusher for my Remix applications and am loving it!

According to Vercel's website SocketIO is NOT supported, however Pusher Channels is recommended in it's place. Not sure what it is, but it supposedly is supported by vercel and potentially can help.

Pusher is a hosted service that makes it super-easy to add real-time data and functionality to web and mobile applications. It sits as a real-time layer between your servers and your clients. Pusher maintains persistent connections to the clients — over WebSocket if possible and falling back to HTTP-based connectivity — so that as soon as your servers have new data that they want to push to the clients they can do, instantly via Pusher.

Then watchPosition from @react-native-community/geolocation is definitely the way to go. Here's a link to the example in their repo. This will constantly update the position state variable, which you can then send to a realtime service which other users are subscribed to and consuming. (Depending on your implementation, could be a websocket or some pub/sub service... I've worked with Pusher Channels before for something similar.)

An easy way to start with is to use external Pusher channels service It requires 0 devops and everything works very well, for free at least at the beginning. However, like any external service, it can't scale without paying. "Pay as you grow".

I see that NextJS now recommends a pub/sub approach Vercel Support Your client will need to subscribe to the events from a 3rd party service like Pusher Channels and the Pub should be handled by a serverless function

Centrifugo is very similar to pusher.com Channels product (https://pusher.com/channels) – but self-hosted. Also – somewhat similar to socket.io - but not a library, so can work with any backend. Centrifugo is pretty unique in terms of available features sum – so can't say that there is a direct analogue I've heard about - sth from one product, sth from another, sth unique. And of course there are alternatives which can do what Centrifugo can't since the market of real-time servers is quite big.

Then watchPosition from @react-native-community/geolocation is definitely the way to go. Here's a link to the example in their repo. This will constantly update the position state variable, which you can then send to a realtime service which other users are subscribed to and consuming. (Depending on your implementation, could be a websocket or some pub/sub service... I've worked with Pusher Channels before for something similar.)

I like this one https://github.com/michalchudziak/react-native-geolocation

For location, you can use the [geolocation library](https://github.com/michalchudziak/react-native-geolocation). If for some reason the user blocks this permission, a neat little trick is to call this API, [https://ipapi.co/json/\]([https://ipapi.co/json/](https://ipapi.co/json/)). They will get the users Longitude and Latitude based on the requesting IP. Of course, that will be masked if they have a VPN running. But it is a second attempt at getting a location.

You can just use react-native-geolocation and it's watchPosition method to just listen to location changes and respond to that accordingly. If it comes within 10-15-20-50 meters from the college you can count that as arrival.

Here's some APIs to look into, maybe you could do searches based on libraries https://github.com/michalchudziak/react-native-geolocation

@react-native-community/geolocation