hikearound
A trail discovery community where users posted, reviewed, and shared local hikes across an iOS app, a web app, and a weekly email newsletter.
The mobile app: saved hikes with route thumbnails on the profile tab, and a trail detail with route map and elevation profile.
Hikearound was a multi-platform community for discovering, saving, and sharing local hiking trails. The system was three connected products: an iOS app, a web app, and a weekly email newsletter, all sitting on a shared Firebase backend. Trails came from users posting their own hikes, with reviews and ratings, location-aware recommendations, and curated lists of favorites.
I built and ran the whole thing solo. The iOS app ran on React Native with Expo, the web app on Next.js with server-rendered hike pages, and the backend on Firebase Cloud Functions handling email templates for the newsletter, push notifications, translations into English and Spanish, and the rest of the connective tissue.
I pulled the iOS app from the App Store and took the website down a few years ago. The repos are still on GitHub, though, including a fairly thorough Storybook component library, which is where the design work actually happened. Hikearound was my first real attempt at designing primarily in code rather than in a separate design tool, a pattern that's becoming common now that AI makes it easier.