Hiking app for outdoor enthusiasts

Tom Potanski

Last updated on May 25, 2023 | 3 min read

Navigation app for hikers in Norway

Project Overview

Hiking app is a mobile application for outdoor enthusiasts who want to explore Norway. It offers a number of functionalities that significantly improve the experience of touring the country. It contains a database of tourist attractions such as trekking, cycling and climbing routes, restaurants, hotels, equipment rentals etc. All of the attractions can be conveniently browsed from the map or searched using filters.

Functionality

Users of the app form one big community and can contribute and expand the database by adding their outdoor activity preferences and tourist attraction information directly on the maps. Users can post comments, leave ratings and reviews so that other community members can benefit from their experience. Moreover, they can add the selected attraction on the map as their destination, making it easier to navigate and reach their destination.

Users can also create groups to organize trips together, communicate and share tips. It is worth mentioning that the application is integrated with MET Norway meteorological warnings and offers the most current and up-to-date weather forecasts for a given region.

Owners of equipment rentals, sports facilities, bars and other attractions can also advertise here (paid in-app ads) to attract more enthusiasts. Ads are displayed based on the user’s geolocation. The application was downloaded over 13 thousand times. Rating is high (4.8 on Android and 4.5 on iOS) and the application itself gathers a vivid community of users adding comments about destinations to the app.

High user rating

The application has reached a very high rating score of 4.8 on Google Play Store with almost 80 reviews, and more than 13,000 downloads.

Technologies

Modern, cutting-edge mobile technology frameworks for better product quality.

• To build the app, the React Native technology has been used. Main difference between it and original React is that React Native uses native components instead of web components as building blocks.
• The TypeScript is quickly gaining popularity as an open-source framework, which is developed and maintained by Microsoft. It allows to produce a maintainable code of very high quality.
• Due to the growing popularity of the app, it becomes harder and harder to control the state of the components. And here comes Redux which is a state controller based on Flux Facebook architecture developed to help to write applications that behave consistently, run in different environments, and are easy to test.
• Usage of Redux-saga which is a middleware library for Redux makes the app easier to manage, more efficient to execute, easier to test, and better at handling failures.
• The Firebase that has been used is a toolset to build, improve and grow the app. It allows developers to focus on creating the best possible user experience.
• SendBird provides the widely used development kit allowing developers to quickly build very effective chat interfaces for their services.
• To achieve the highest quality, the app is based on Mapbox and OpenStreetMap, which provide very interactive and customizable vector maps.