This was going to be a crowd sourced climbing topo app for the climbing community.
There weren't any apps out there that allowed users to create and upload topos on mobile. 27Crags and thecrag.com exist but you have to use their web interface. Rockfax is all paid for premium guidebooks - which are excellent, but paid for.
The idea was that you could take a photo on your phone and draw the topo routes on, give them a name and grade and upload.
This is all built and working, however i've decided to stop working on this project for a few reasons:
- (I can't be bothered to maintain a / I don't want to create a) new database of climbing routes. There's enough out there already (27 crags, thecrag.com, rockfax, climb around, etc) and the community doesn't need more fragmentation. I did contact a few of them to see if i could integrate with their backend and use and add to their climbing route database, but you can imagine the responses (or lack of). The crag.com did get back to me, but they're building their own cross-platform app and didn't want the overheads of integrating with another app of questionable origin.
- I wasn't sure about the legalities of uploading existing routes that are present in other paid for guidebooks. Would this be some sort of plagiarism?
- This project started as a way for me to learn Android development and I never really intended of releasing it, hence no tests and sometimes scrappy development.
- Since its only Android, I'm missing half the world, and new cross platform frameworks like flutter and react native are becoming better and better. I could re-write but the idea simply isn't worth investing any more time into.