London, United Kingdom (15 June 2020) – As retail businesses prepare to reopen in the UK, maintaining social distancing remains critical to controlling the transmission of COVID-19.

Crowdless, a free app launched in April, helps people to avoid crowds while shopping and promotes social distancing. Crowdless provides real-time information on how crowded supermarkets are so that users can visit during the least busy times or choose a less crowded place to shop. It combines third-party data with real-time feedback from users themselves. Crowdless has global coverage and is available in 8 languages.

Because Crowdless provides people with real-time information on the busyness of stores before they leave home, it can help supermarkets optimise footfall by enabling people to pick the best time to shop.

Crowdless was developed by UK-based Lanterne, as a result of their wish to help people make informed decisions and keep safe as they carry out their essential tasks during the pandemic.  It was recently selected as one of the winners of Innovate UK’s “Business-led innovation in response to global disruption” competition.

Yohan Iddawela, one of the Co-Founders of Crowdless, said: “Many families are trying to find a new normal now that restrictions are being lifted. Our community of 60,000 use Crowdless to save time, to plan better and to stay safe. By giving them real-time info on how busy stores are, they can avoid crowds and practise social distancing. We encourage stores to use our data to improve their own social distancing systems and to promote the safety of their customers.”

Crowdless’s redesign, which goes live today, supports customers coping with the ever-changing lockdown rules in stores by allowing them to add and save their favourite shops, add additional stores and encouraging them to volunteer as community ambassadors.

Alex Barnes, Co-Founder, said: “We’re all trying to juggle multiple things at the moment – working from home, home schooling, speaking with friends, making meals. We don’t want to waste precious time waiting in line. On average, we were spending 5.5 hours a month waiting in lines before COVID-19 and now it’s much more. Checking Crowdless for five seconds can save you hours of waiting in a queue.”

The free app, which can be downloaded globally, is available from the App Store and Google Play. Currently the largest number of users are in the UK, Germany, and Spain.

“We want to remain a community app, with information generated by our users, so today’s redesign with new features helps to provide localised information on how crowded places are. We all need to do our part to keep our community safe by halting the transmission rate. It’s only through a collective effort that we’ll break the transmission the coronavirus,” said Sebastian Mueller, Co-Founder.

Crowdless is part-funded by the European Space Agency’s Business Incubation Centre (United Kingdom),

the Oxford Foundry (University of Oxford), and Generate (London School of Economics and Political Science).

-ENDS-

Notes to Editors:

To download multimedia assets please visit: crowdlessapp.co/media 

Information on Data Privacy: Lanterne observes stringent data privacy protection standards. Crowdless is GDPR compliant, and does not collect users’ personal information. Location information is collected on an opt-in basis, only for the purpose of returning the most relevant results. Lanterne works closely with Adapt (weareadapt.io) to ensure high quality data protection standards.

About Crowdless: Please visit crowdlessapp.co for more information.
Twitter: @crowdless_app