Mission-critical app gets a refresh

At Abletech, we are proud to maintain the AED Locations app for iOS and Android. AEDs (Automated External Defibrillator) are life-saving machines that help to treat Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA), and the AED Locations app makes it easy for you to find these when you need them. You may have seen the AED symbol while out-and-about across the motu, indicating that one is nearby, available 24/7 or during specific hours. We also maintain the AED Locations website, providing access to these locations from your mobile or desktop browser.

A mission-critical app

The AED Locations app shows you the location of your nearest AED, allows you to search for AEDs, and displays the details of an AED, including its hours of availability, physical address and instructions on how to access it. This experience is bundled up into native apps for iOS and Android. The purpose of AED Locations is twofold - to bring awareness to the availability of these AEDs across New Zealand, and to provide you with an essential resource to find your nearest AED in the event that you, or someone else, needs it.

Because of this, an app like AED Locations needs to be readily accessible, available and resilient. Once a user downloads the app to their device, they might only open it at a critical moment - when it needs to work, and fast. When they open it, they could be in an area with poor or no internet connectivity, not have data available on their mobile, or be running low on battery.

The 2025 refresh

To further improve your experience with the AED mobile apps, and make them even more resilient, we updated them in late 2025, bringing performance and stability improvements, as well as a refreshed user interface.

To ensure a consistent experience, regardless of your choice of mobile platform, we wanted to bring the functionality of both apps into alignment. We took the opportunity to look at how each app behaved, taking the best of each, while still respecting platform conventions. For example, the Android app had the ability to center on an AED location once selected, so we brought that behaviour to the iOS app. The iOS app showed a “Report a problem” button after selecting an AED, which we added on Android.

Accessibility was another important factor in this refresh. Screen readers will now have an easier time understanding screen content and navigating around the app, and it is now possible to open and close bottom sheets in the app using accessibility actions. Bottom sheets were given explicit close buttons, providing an escape hatch when gestures are difficult. Both apps now support dynamic font sizing, so if you set a particular font size preference on your device, the apps will respect that and increase (or decrease) the size of text on the screen.

We’ve improved the behind-the-scenes behaviour - both apps now check for new locations in the background every 24 hours, helping to keep the list of locations up-to-date as much as possible. Even if you install the app but never open it, or have no internet connection, the app is pre-bundled with a list of known locations at the time of release - meaning you’re never without a list of locations to refer to. Operations to fetch and update data in the local database were rewritten and optimised, to make them more efficient and reliable.

The tech stack of both apps was also modernised. The Android app now uses Kotlin Flows for data exchange, and native layouts for all screens. This resulted in a significant reduction in the amount of memory and battery the app was using. The iOS app now uses SwiftUI and Combine, and as a result, we use system UI elements which makes the app familiar and easy to use. Gestures that you would use in other native apps are also supported, such as the ability to swipe sheets up and down, adding to the consistent experience.

Conclusion

The mission-critical nature of the AED Locations apps on mobile means that users need to be able to use the app in a variety of conditions, at the time when they need it most. It needs to be reliable, resilient and fast. By refreshing the apps in late 2025, we improved performance, aligned features across platforms, and enhanced the accessibility of the app, ensuring it is available to, and usable by, as many users as possible across Aotearoa.

If you haven’t already, download the app for iOS and Android, or bookmark the site on your device. Is there an AED location not present in the app? Use this form to suggest it!