Picture this scenario: you're late to work, so you're driving a little too quickly, hoping to avoid speed traps on your commute. Fortunately, there's an app for that—Waze—which uses crowdsourcing to alert you to the presence of police along your route.
Now picture this: You're an Iranian woman late for work. You grab a taxi, with plans to fix your hijab, or head covering, once you get in the car. But women can't be seen in public with their heads uncovered, so you hope you don't run into any morality police—yes, real morality police—along the way.
As the BBC reports, now there's an app for that, too. It's called Gershad, and much like Waze, it relies on crowdsourced data to help people find and avoid the checkpoints set up in major Iranian cities to catch people violating the dress code. Men can also be singled out for sporting something too Western.
Gershad launched yesterday on Google Play, and its name is a reference to Ershad, the name of the morality police. Similair to how users add a speed trap to Waze, Gershad users can add the location of a morality police van on a map, which then alerts other users to its presence.
The Gershad app also sports a nifty feature that can plan a route that avoids morality checkpoints. Users are encouraged to confirm sightings, and if a particular location doesn't get many confirmations, it will fade and eventually disappear off the map. According to the app's designers, Ershad warned 3 million people last year for not following the dress code, the BBC says.
Aside from the obvious benefit to Iranian women, the app could also be useful to foreign tourists as Iran opens up to the West. U.S. tour operators are scrambling to meet the demand from Americans who are interested in visiting the country now that sanctions have been lifted, according to the New York Times. For now, Gershad is only available in Persian.
It remains to be seen if Gershad will survive in a country that is not opposed to banning apps. More critical to the app's survival is attracting a committed user base.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.