There aren’t many apps in the app-sphere that targets the hobby fishers, kind of guys who rather than partying and cheering on a weekend prefer fishing in the nearby lake.

When two long-time friends came complaining to us how fishing is dying as a hobby in their community, they had high expectation. All they knew about us is this that we develop mobile apps.

With the advent of smartphone capable of running multiple apps, everyone has raised their ante on technology and wants a share. They were not very different either.

I joined the company. I was excited about the first project I would get my hands on. This was the first time I was given a chance to solve a real-world problem. But the problem was I did not know nothing about fishing, let alone the problem hobby-fishers face.

The dying tradition

Building an app to solve a problem I know nothing about was bad idea nevertheless unless I mingle with the community the clients–long-time friends, Jesse and Colin, were talking about. Fishing on weekends, they have been doing since they were little kids. It almost became a tradition for them and many other people in the community.

The biggest problem was the new, internet generation that was impatient and often cried foul whenever they were asked to join the elders on a fishing expedition. They found it boring and many stopped coming on weekends. This was bad sign. The tradition showed the first sign of dying.

Building an app to lure the internet generation is a great idea Jesse and Colin came up with, except they were clueless what the app should do. In a nutshell, they wanted an app to pique interest of the smartphone generation so that they develop fishing as a hobby and pass it to the next generation just what their parents did and theirs.

Finding the problem

Amongst the many problems we found, the major one was the impatient young people were less successful catching fishes. This made them lose their interest and eventually give up.

Many were keen to use their smartphone to log their fishing activities, capture photos and share it on social media but with one of their hands preoccupied with the fishing rod, they couldn’t. This was a cause of a major frustration for the impatient.

In addition, many young people lacked motivation to go fishing over the fear of coming back empty handed and being on the humiliation radar of every other kid in the community. They needed a source of motivation. 

An app: For the fishers, to the fishers

We came up with a demo soon. The app could run both on Android and iOS platform and could give data on weather conditions and fishing areas, which had a favorable number of fishes within the water bodies whether it was a river, sea, or a lake.

With the app, locating and catching fishes became easier, but recording the number of fishes caught in a day or trip and taking their pictures, was still difficult. Holding the fishing rod in one hand and clicking photos with the mobile phone on the other hand was uncomfortable, especially for youngsters.

Developing A Wearable app

To remedy the problem, we developed a wearable app, which could be coupled with the smartphone to pair with the app.

This wearable device freed the users to take their mobile phones out to record their trips or collect data about it, at the time of fishing, whenever they desire. They could simply wear it on their wrist and could carry out many functions just by simple taps on their smartwatch.

The working

The method, which was to be followed, was to tap the wristwatch at the beginning of the trip and tap it back at the end of the trip. The app would then collect data for the entire trip between the Start and Stop points. On catching a fish, the user needs to tap on the fish count button on the watch app. Next time they catch a fish, they need to tap on the count button again and have to tap it every time they catch a fish.

The app records all activities and statistics while a person is fishing. The watch app automatically logs a user’s various locations in a waterbody every time he goes fishing. Based on the data from previous fishing patterns, experienced and history in the waterbody aggregated on the app server, the app suggests a user which are the best places to catch fishes.

At the end of the trip, the app gives a detailed report and displays the following information:

1) Scorecard – Gives you number of fishes caught on a particular day or in all trips put together.

2) Import Weather Data – Gives weather forecast, outside temperature, wind direction, wind speed for current location as determined by the GPS.

3) Total Duration across trips, Total Distance covered across trips

Aftermaths

The solution in the form of mobile and wearable apps made the entire fishing activity easy. Gradually, the number of young hobby fishers joining Jesse and Colin on their weekend fishing trips, increased. The group started tracking their own feats and became better in their own game. They even started sharing updates about their trips and pics of their catch within friends and family circle, which inspired many more people to join fishing expedition with them, even people from nearby towns and villages.

The community of hobby fishers grew.

The brothers organized an event recently which brought in 500 or so fishers from across the county.

The development goes on! 

We added some more features to the app. It now crowdsources data from individual fishing profiles active on it, which lets users compare their fishing feats with one another, and search data based on categories like fishes caught of a particular type, the highest number of fishes caught by any individual, fishing locations which yielded the highest catch and so. The app served as a boon to the hobby fishers and brought the internet generation back to the lake.

Fishing was never so much fun!

Author Bio:

Shahid Mansuri Co-founded Peerbits, one of the leading Top mobile app development company USA, in 2011. His visionary leadership and flamboyant management style have yield fruitful results for the company. He believes in sharing his strong knowledge base with leaned concentration on entrepreneurship and business. Being an avid nature lover, he likes to flaunt his pajamas on beach during the vacations.