Are you sick of going to the same old bar to grab a drink? Although it’s nice to be on first-name terms with the bartender, sometimes it’s also fun to try a new watering hole. An app called Bar Roulette wants to be your wingman and introduce you to new bars, and now, it’s available for download on the Apple App Store.
Updated on 05-07-2016 by Lulu Chang: Bar Roulette introduces iOS app
The app takes advantage of APIs from Yelp and Uber to find the perfect place to take you out, but Bar Roulette doesn’t tell you where you’re headed until you arrive at the bar.
How does it work? All you have to do is sign into the app with your Uber account and request a ride, choosing a relative radius so that you’re not too far out of your comfort zone. Uber will then whisk you away to a random bar, which has been vetted by Yelp. Of course, the app only picks “top rated” bars within a certain radius. While the app itself is free, you can make a $2.99 in-app purchase to access the Foursquare feature that allows you to filter bars by price, and also check out your Bar History so that you … remember where you’ve been.
”It even checks to make sure the bar is open, so it works on Saturday morning … I won’t judge,” Bar Roulette’s creator Tyler Swarts wrote on Product Hunt.
Commenters on Product Hunt have already asked for added functionality like restaurants and Airbnb to complete the whole weekend experience. That way, your weekend getaway could be planned for you — You wouldn’t have to pick out a place to stay, where to eat, or the bar you end up in around 2 a.m.
“We have some good new features in the works,” Bar Roulette’s creator Tyler Swartz says, “one of those is the option to exclude Foursquare bars you’ve already checked in at, to increase the chance that we’ll take you somewhere you haven’t been before.”
Swartz said he came up with the idea when he was trying to think of a final project for his programming class. “When I read that the Uber API now had ride requests I knew exactly what I should build Bar Roulette,” he said. “A big struggle some nights (and afternoons) is picking a bar to go to. I often end up going to the same spots. Bar Roulette is how I fixed that and added some excitement to picking a bar.”
