Their use has experienced a serious boost in recent days with the growing shortage of fuels. The strike launched by the CGT in the refineries of TotalEnergies caused a massive influx of motorists to often empty service stations. One of the remedies for refueling? Use applications that list the fuels still available at the nearest stations.
They are called Gaspal, Gasoline & Co and Gasoil Now, Fuel Price or Cheapest Station and are available for download on iOS for iPhone and on Android. All these apps already had a strong community of users and the current situation has spawned new ones in proportions never seen before.
In the ranking of free apps on iOS, the top 5 was monopolized on Monday by 4 gas hunting apps. On Android, three of them currently occupy the top 5 of the most downloaded.
A sudden crowd
“We typically have 3 million monthly users of the mobile site and app. There were 1.2 million this weekend alone compared to 409,000 the previous weekend,” explains Ripple Motion, the Nantes-based development agency behind Essence & Co.
“We had already had peaks during the Yellow Vests crisis but we recently increased the capacities of our servers to meet the current technical challenge”, specifies this company specializing in applications for industrial companies. Site traffic and use of the application also exploded last March at the start of the Russian offensive with 5 million monthly users.
Same observation at Gasoil Now. “We are normally on 1.5 million monthly users but we have multiplied by 20 the downloads since last week”, specifies Minh Tu Pham, the leader of 03 July, the development agency of the application which has supplanted TikTok or Revolut on download stores. “We sometimes have 100,000 downloads per second after a passage in a report in a news, she smiles. Social networks and word-of-mouth also bring us back users looking for a collaborative solution that covers station by station,” emphasizes the entrepreneur.
Like Gasoil Now, the Gaspal application provides access to a map of stations open in France, but also in Spain and Italy. Essence & Co offers more or less the same services. Make your choice !
- Essence & Co: click here to download the application on iPhone, or here on Android
- Gaspal: click here to download it on iPhone, or here on Android.
- Diesel Now: click here to download the application on iPhone, or here on Android