With nature offering incredible benefits for both mental and physical well-being, more people are looking to start hiking as a way to reconnect with the outdoors. However, for beginners, starting out can be overwhelming.
With HikeMate, we hope to provide beginners with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface to get started with hiking.
Take advantage of our numerous, free tutorials on the art and pleasure of hiking.
Search for hikes anywhere in the world and get relevant information at a glance to choose a suitable hike.
Get more detailed information about a particular hike you are interested in, such as restrooms, trashcans or biergartens on the way.
Save hikes you are interested in to easily find them, plan them.
Follow your progress in real time while you go hiking.
Want to give it a try? You can find the APK file in the releases section of the GitHub repository. You can also use a third-party app such as Obtainium to download the app on your phone directly from GitHub.
HikeMate is open-source and thus, you can contribute to it by opening PRs and issues.
If you notice a bug or would like to request a feature, feel free to open an issue on the repo. You can also work on the bug fix/feature yourself and open a PR.
To build the app for yourself, clone the current repository and open it as an Android Studio project. For reference, we used a few patches of Android during the project, the last one being Android Ladybug 2024.2.1 Patch 3.
You can build HikeMate like any other app you would with Android Studio, no additional setup involved.
To run the project tests locally, open the Run Anything dialog of Android Studio, and type
gradle check connectCheck jacocoTestReport
This will run unit tests (test folder), integration tests (androidTest folder) and generate a Jacoco code coverage report.
Depending on your needs, you might as well remove the jacocoTestReport or run only check/connectCheck.
Note
Integration tests (connectCheck, in the androidTest folder) require you to have an emulator or a connected Android device, as those tests have to be run in an actual Android context.
If you intend to contribute, you might want to first spend a little time understanding how the app works in its current state.
The first thing you might want to do is read about MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), as the app follows a similar architecture.
As for the app itself, there are a few resources you can use such as
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Our architecture diagram will give you a broad view of the components of the app (screens, view models, repositories) and how they interact. The diagram is available on Excalidraw or as an SVG.
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Our Figma mockup and wireframe will give you an idea of what we envisioned, with a few features that are not implemented yet.
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The code itself contains documentation (docstrings) that can help you particular functions, attributes and state flows.
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Finally, our wiki should provide you with guidance about organization (branch naming conventions, the process to follow when working on a PR, ...) plus give you some ideas of features that are not implemented yet you could work on.
Thank you for your interest in this project, feel free to open a PR or an issue if you are interested in contributing!