LiftLine
A phone app for office workers that shows live elevator wait times, predicted car arrivals, and which lobby kiosk to walk to so you stop losing the morning rush.
daily office workers in large multi-tenant commercial buildings
- Live wait-time estimate per elevator bank, learned from your building's actual traffic
- 'Go now' nudge that tells you when the next car will reach your floor in under 30 seconds
- Floor-by-floor crowd forecasts for the morning and lunch rush
- Works without hardware — uses anonymized phone signals and existing elevator APIs where available
Article shows simple up/down buttons beat fancy kiosks in most buildings; there's a clear opportunity to bring that algorithmic visibility to the rider's pocket.
HN thread is real conversation (370 pts), but complaints are venting — no evidence of users downloading/installing a dedicated wait-time app; only hobbyist GitHub projects (Moosa-05/Elevator_Wait_Time_Predictor) and a personal demo (abhisht2000/smart-lift) exist, no mainstream consumer traction.Elevator_Wait_Time_Predictor - GitHub ↗Smart Lift Tracker - Abhisht2000 ↗
The elevator-control layer is owned by OEMs (Schindler PORT, TK Elevator, Rosslare AxTraxPro) and wrapped inside tenant-experience platforms (Cohesion, iFactory, SINGU); a standalone consumer-facing elevator wait-time app is a small niche against these incumbents who already do elevator call + monitoring.Schindler PORT - Elevator destination dispatch ↗Cohesion in-app elevator call ↗Tenant Mobile Access App for Smart Building Properties ↗
Consumers won't pay for a single-building utility app; building owners already pay for elevator monitoring inside broader tenant-experience platforms (iFactory, SINGU, Cohesion) — a standalone 'wait time' feature is hard to charge for and easy to bundle free as a tenant perk.Tenant Experience Platform: Digital Building Services - iFactory ↗Elevator Traffic Analysis & Wait Time Optimization - iFactory ↗
Destination dispatch and modern dispatch algorithms (Schindler PORT, OTIS Compass) are migrating the intelligence into the building itself — the 'which kiosk to walk to' problem is being solved at the lobby, eroding the need for a phone-side app over time.Schindler PORT - Elevator destination dispatch ↗Unified Elevator Control for Modern Buildings - Rosslare ↗
Requires real-time elevator telemetry (car position, direction, load) that most buildings don't expose; without OEM or building-operator partnerships the app is reduced to crude proxies (time-of-day, self-reported sensors) which won't beat the 90-second lobby baseline that engineers already monitor on SCADA.Elevator Traffic Analysis & Wait Time Optimization - iFactory ↗