The developer of Deliveries, a package tracking application, which is listed as the choice of the App Store editor and which some people here at On the edge rely, he said, “can no longer maintain the same service” due to a lack of support from supply companies. In a post published on April 5 by developer Mike Piontek, the company said that “Deliveries rely on many different transport companies and without their help, the application cannot continue to work the way you expect.”
The impetus for the publication seems to be the fact that Deliveries can no longer track FedEx shipments. While the app can usually allow users to track the progress of their package on a map or receive notifications if something changes, the app currently doesn’t show estimated delivery date, current location, or other information if you enter a FedEx tracking number. Instead, it prompts you to open the FedEx package tracking page in your web browser.
MacRumors also reports that the shipping feature, which allows you to place an Amazon order link to track your package, also no longer works.
Customer Response on April 4, Junecloud (the supply company) tweets that FedEx will be removed from its list of supported services, alleging that FedEx “has decided to block third-party trackers, such as deliveries, from their API”. The FedEx developer website doesn’t seem to mention major changes to its API, although it suggests that as of March 31, anyone who issues or creates custom labels for land-based labels should send people to its website instead.
There are also reports that FedEx is working on adding the ability to track packets from other carriers to its own application, which would make it a competitor to applications such as Deliveries.
Piontek said in a later tweet that it knows nothing about what customers can do to track FedEx packages in deliveries. Junecloud says you’ll still be able to add FedEx packages to deliveries, but you’ll only see tracking information if you go for an online review. According to the services page, this type of change has happened before with other carriers, such as Royal Mail and Australia Post.
The Junecloud publication predicts that other operators will begin to suspend access to their APIs. The company says that “over time, more delivery services will probably no longer display tracking information directly in the app,” and apologizes that these types of changes make the app less useful. Junecloud also says it will do its best to continue to make deliveries as useful as it can.
Like some people commented, the publication raises the question of whether this change comes for every delivery application – will all developers have to give up support for FedEx package tracking and will shipping companies push people to their first applications? This was said by Ivan Pavlov, the developer of the Parcel package tracking application On the edge in an email that some developers may be able to handle the changes:
“I believe that in the case of FedEx, they simply have limited access to their tracking website. This became a supply problem and they stopped supporting it. FedEx continues to be maintained in Parcel. Obviously, however, there is always a chance that something will change or break in the future.
However, Pavlov agreed with Junecloud’s publication on operators who are sometimes hostile to third-party delivery applications. “Supporting different operators is a challenge and not all of them are friendly to third-party developers. There is no guarantee that an operator will always be supported in every application, including mine.