It’s the battle of our generation - iPhone vs. Android - and Yelp has some novel data on what makes these devices different. Users of both are aligned in their passion of using Yelp to find restaurants as well as nightlife, plumbers and even dentists. However, when we dug into the search queries, some interesting differences were revealed - some stereotypical (brunch, Starbucks, cheap, luxury, whole foods/organic), some not so much (beer vs. wine, ramen vs. steaks). Regardless of the differences, we discovered some things for certain: everyone loves sushi, pizza, and delivery of all kinds! Let’s start with a...

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Over the years Yelp has built cool integrations with partners such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and many others that have enabled users to interact with our rich dataset in unique ways. One of the methods we’ve used to achieve these integrations is by building a robust, scalable data feeds system, which contains information for over 50 million businesses. As we allow partners to have their own configurations, information included in these feeds may vary from one partner to another and we did not have an easy way to access the history of data feeds that were delivered to our partners....

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Dynamically loaded images are a cornerstone of many Android applications. At Yelp, images are critical to how we connect consumers with great businesses. As network connections and device hardware have become more powerful, the quantity and quality of images that users have come to expect has continued to increase. Images can easily become the largest consumer of device memory and network data, and handling the downloading and management of this data becomes a daunting task. We explored several solutions to this problem, and ultimately decided that Glide provided a great combination of performance, ease of use, and a robust feature...

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Savvy developers like you already know that the Yelp API is the best place to get information on local businesses. Today, as a part of our on-going integration with our friends at both Yelp SeatMe and Yelp Eat24, we are excited to announce an additional feature of the API: “Action Links.” Action Links will allow your users to directly make a reservation or even start a food order for delivery or pickup from wherever you’re displaying Yelp data. To see this in action (pardon the pun), next time you use the Search endpoint or the Business endpoint, simply pass in...

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Yelp’s API allows any developer to build rich user experiences by integrating Yelp’s local business information, reviews, and pictures into their web and mobile applications. We announced in January that we have ambitious plans to make it easier than ever for developers to integrate a local layer into their apps. Today, we’re excited to present one of these efforts: a brand new API console that allows developers to explore the detail and depth of responses returned by the Yelp API, without having to write a single line of code. Sign up for a free account, create your API v2 credentials,...

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Let’s say you had a great new idea for a Todo app and set out to build an awesome iPhone application. After firing up your copy of Xcode, you’d probably start by creating a UITableView – a critical part of the iOS SDK that allows you to build scrolling views. At Yelp, we’ve been playing around with different table view architectures for years. After a lot of trial and error, we’ve come up with a framework that easily scales from the simplest list all the way up to our business page. We’re open sourcing it today – check out YLTableView...

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WWDC is coming up soon and it’s going to be a blast! We’ve got our Apple Watch (with our lovely Yelp App installed, of course!) and are ready to party. To celebrate, we’re hosting our third annual WWDC party on June 8 and raffling off an Apple Watch (so you can use our app too)! While you’re in town for WWDC, make sure to catch some of the other great meetups we’ve got lined up. We’ll also be speaking at a Women in Tech event at Alpine Labs and at a DBA Happy Hour co-hosted with Box! We’re also really...

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Being able to easily find what you want on Yelp is a critical part in ensuring the best user experience. One thing that can negatively affect that experience is displaying duplicate business listings in search results, and if you use Yelp often enough, you might have run into duplicate listings yourself. We constantly receive new business information from a variety of sources including external partners, business owners, and Yelp users. It isn’t always easy to tie different updates from different sources to the same business listing, so we sometimes mistakenly generate duplicates. Duplicates are especially bad when both listings have...

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