Here is something I should have done a year ago.
I have been running two separate fuel price apps: Spritpreise Österreich for Austria and Spritpreise Deutschland for Germany. Both apps had loyal users. Both were growing. And both were quietly eating every spare hour of my weekends.
A month ago, the Salzburger Nachrichten ran a story about them. I woke up to a flood of messages from new users, feature requests, and a lot of people simply saying thanks. (I wrote more about that story, and how AI changed my development process, in a separate post.) The timing turned out to be perfect, because I was already a few weeks away from making a decision I had been sitting on for a while.
The honest reason
Here is the thing most people do not realize: both apps ran on identical source code. Just different configurations. The code itself was never the hard part.
I am a software engineer by trade and a builder by instinct. What drains me are the operational basics. Two App Store presences means two sets of screenshots, two update cycles, two review inboxes, all of it squeezed into the hours left after a full-time job and a family. That math does not work forever.
So I made a call. Instead of stretching myself across two apps every weekend, I would put all that energy into one better app.
What Petroly is
Calling Petroly a merger would undersell it. It is the app I wanted to build from the start. I just never had the bandwidth while keeping two others alive.
Petroly now covers 9 European countries in 10 languages with 72,000+ stations. You get live prices, price alerts, price history, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and route planning with fuel stops along the way. Everything the old apps offered is here, in one place.
Two of the new countries are Slovenia and Greece, added just in time for vacation season. And adding a new country no longer means shipping a separate app.
What happens to the old apps
Spritpreise Österreich and Spritpreise Deutschland will stop receiving updates. They will stay on the stores for now, but active development has ended. If you use either app, Petroly has everything you were used to. The switch takes less than a minute.
Get Petroly
Petroly is free on iOS and Android:
- iOS: Download on the App Store
- Android: Get it on Google Play
- Website: petroly.app
One app for all countries. And hopefully, a few weekends back.