Mumbai Toilet Locator app is functional but needs more detailed information to really be useful

The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai has launched an app on called Mumbai Toilet Locator , to allow citizens to easily find toilets across the city.

The application is a 3.94 MB download. The only permission the application needs is access to maps. When you open the application, the app shows your current location, and a map of nearby toilets. The view can be tilted. The BMC has on record over 1300 toilets in the city, but it is not clear if all of these toilets are in the application.

The application takes some time to load the toilets. This lag can be reduced to provide a better user experience. After the few seconds of lag however, all the toilets across the entire city are loaded at once. There are two buttons to navigate to a toilet on the bottom right of the screen. Tapping on either of them pushes you onto Google Maps. While Google Maps does have more advanced functionalities, especially for drivers, it would be better to navigate from within the application itself.

Another functionality that would be really helpful is showing a list of parking spaces along with the list of toilets, and if and where toilets are available in a close proximity to parking spaces.

Every toilet has an attached image. This is presumably for easy identification. However, many of the images are glitch, damaged, or do not provide any useful information. There is no way to close an image once it has been loaded, and the only way to do so is to force close the application and restart it. Loading too many images is liable to cause the application to crash.

More information is more power to the user. The application seems to have an icon for men and women, which seems to indicate that toilets for both men and women are available. However, all the toilets have the same icon, which seems suspicious. There are many toilets which are only for men across the city, and these have not been marked as such.

The application could have more granular information. This can be information on how many stalls are at the toilets, if there are water closets (western toilets), if there are handicap toilets, and if there are bathrooms at these locations. Such information would really be helpful to outsiders and tourists. Other useful information includes what hours the toilets are open, if the toilets are paid or not, what days the toilets are open on, whether there is facility for disposal of sanitary napkins, and a crowd sourced rating system for figuring out how stinky the toilets are.

Another problem is that the application does not track urinals separately. There are locations where only urinals are present, and these are not present on the application. We have not found any examples of the inverse, where a urinal has been marked as a toilet, which is thankfully a good thing.

Most of the information needed to make the application a lot better is already publicly available on the Mumbai Municipality web site ( pdf ). The application is pretty functional and basic, but can easily include performance enhancements, additional information, and integrated navigation.

There are other similar applications. Google Maps recently launched an integrated feature to search for public toilets in Delhi and Madhya Pradesh. The Susuvidha – Clean Toilet finder app has crowdsourced ratings for the toilets, based on how clean they are.

The Swacch Bharat Toilet Locator developed by the Ministry of Urban Development, provides similar functionality. It includes detailed information such as if the toilet is disabled friendly, the opening hours. The rating system has scores for hygiene, infrastructure and safety. However, the scores have not been rated for all the toilets. New toilets can be submitted by the user directly to the database. However, getting into the map view is a little buggy, and it is better to operate the app from the list view, to find nearby toilets.

The Mumbai Toilet Locator is a free application available on the Android platform as of now, and the developer is MCGM24X7. The application has been downloaded only 10 to 50 times, but has a rating of 3.8 stars, with mostly positive reviews.