The Check In Is Dead; Long Live The Check In As Foursquare Adds Quick Glide Feature On iOS
Depending who you ask, Foursquare could be in a great place as far as growth. Or in a bad place. We've heard about potential acquisitions, difficulty fundraising and everything in between.
Context & Ripple Effects
Foursquare had already signaled a strategic reset in 2012, de-emphasizing the check-in while focusing on data and revenue. Quick Glide makes that direction concrete on iOS: the product’s defining action is being made less conspicuous and less laborious rather than abandoned.
That repositioning follows years of criticism that location check-ins could feel like work, including a 2010 challenge to the ritual’s appeal. The immediate product question is whether reducing friction preserves the activity Foursquare needs for its broader data-led strategy.
First-order effects
- Foursquare’s iOS users can record a visit with less effort, reducing the participation burden attached to the service’s core action.
- For Foursquare, Quick Glide aligns the consumer interface with its stated move away from making check-ins the product’s central destination.
Second-order effects
- A faster check-in flow gives Foursquare a better chance to retain the location activity underpinning the data and revenue strategy it outlined in 2012.
- Foursquare’s product team must increasingly judge features by whether they generate useful location activity without requiring users to engage in the older, more overt check-in ritual.
Third-order effects
- If the approach holds, Foursquare’s differentiation shifts from a social check-in mechanic toward a lower-friction location-data product, with the visible action serving the data system rather than defining the service.
- The change points to a broader location-app design trade-off: products seeking recurring behavioral data need to make participation nearly invisible, or risk losing the activity that supports their business model.
The trend: Location services are moving from explicit social check-ins toward lower-friction interactions designed to sustain useful behavioral data.