Big Trails Adventures
Trail navigation and planning, offline
Big Trails Adventures plans personalised, self-guided walking, trail-running and fastpacking holidays on the world's best long-distance trails. CodeLeap is their development team, building and running the mobile app that puts every day of the journey — route, maps and stays — in the walker's pocket.
What we did CodeLeap built GPS trail navigation, trip planning across beginner to advanced routes, in-journey safety chat, a store for travel documents and photos, and accommodation and weather integrations, architecting for offline from the first decision because these routes lead precisely to places with no coverage.
Big Trails Adventures is a mobile app for hikers and adventure travellers that brings trail planning, navigation, accommodation and trip documentation together in a single place. CodeLeap designed and built the app for iOS and Android, with the guiding constraint that it had to remain useful in exactly the conditions where most travel apps stop working, which is to say on a remote trail with no signal. The result functions as a pocket guide for the whole of a trip, supporting the traveller before they set off, while they are out on the route and after they return.
Product features
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GPS trail navigation
Users navigate trail routes with GPS-based guidance built for outdoor conditions, working both online and offline so the app stays dependable in remote areas with little or no connectivity. Offline capability is not a fallback here but the primary case, since the places these routes lead to are precisely the places without coverage.
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Trip planning
Adventurers choose routes, review directions and organise the details of a trip before setting off, across trails ranging from beginner to advanced. Supporting that full spread of difficulty meant the planning tools had to be informative enough for an experienced hiker without intimidating someone attempting their first long route.
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Safety support
An integrated chat feature allows users to request help while they are out on a journey, which provides a meaningful layer of reassurance for anyone travelling through isolated or unfamiliar terrain.
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Travel essentials store
Documents, photographs, saved trails and hotel information are held together in one centralised space, so the practical paperwork of a trip travels with the traveller rather than being scattered across email and camera roll.
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Accommodation integration
Third-party integrations surface places to stay along a chosen route, connecting the exploratory side of planning with the logistics that make a multi-day trip possible.
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Weather information
Current and forecast weather data is presented alongside route information, since on an exposed trail the forecast is often the single factor that determines whether a plan goes ahead.
Challenge
The client saw a clear opportunity in the growing adventure and hiking market, among travellers actively looking for better ways to organise and experience time outdoors. The difficulty was the breadth of the brief, because the app had to serve beginners and experienced hikers at once, and had to combine route planning, navigation, safety, accommodation and personal trip content without becoming an unfocused collection of features. Underlying all of it was the requirement for offline reliability, which shapes every architectural decision in a mapping product and rules out the straightforward approach of fetching what is needed when it is needed. The app had to be a dependable companion in the field, not merely a planning tool that works well at home.
Solution
CodeLeap developed Big Trails Adventures as a mobile app built for people who need both practicality and reliability once they are out on a route. Trail discovery, GPS navigation, weather information, accommodation integrations and personal trip content sit within a single experience, structured so that the traveller has what they need at each stage of a trip. Offline access was designed in from the start rather than added afterwards, which is what allows the app to remain useful in areas with limited internet access. The finished product supports users before, during and after a journey, which is a materially different proposition from the route-finding apps it sits alongside.
Tech stack
The tech chosen was our speciality, enabling fast development of performant user interfaces and a reliable infrastructure.
- Frontend
- React Native (iOS & Android)
- Backend
- Python, Django, PostgreSQL
- Hosting
- AWS
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