Overview
StoryTrek begins with a simple question: what if finishing a book did not mean leaving its world behind?
The app turns distance recorded by a phone or watch into progress along a literary journey. People walk, run, or ride wherever they are; StoryTrek carries that distance through a route shaped by a book’s places and turning points.
Travelers choose a journey, move along it waypoint by waypoint, and collect the moments they encounter. Journeys range from short walks through Wonderland to epic routes drawn from The Odyssey and Don Quixote. A journal, shared company journeys, and cross-device synchronization extend the experience beyond a single walk.
StoryTrek is live on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
StoryTrek was developed with a creative partner. We worked together on the product and experience design. My partner led content development, including researching the journeys, sourcing quotations, and finding public-domain artwork. I was responsible for the application architecture, content system, mobile engineering, health integrations, local and cloud data, purchases, and production delivery.
The challenge
The central design problem was not how to keep people tapping. It was how to help them spend more time with literature, encounter artwork in a meaningful context, and become healthier through movement. Conventional mobile engagement patterns were a poor fit. A sequence of prompts, confirmations, and small tasks would turn the walk and the story into work performed for the app.
StoryTrek instead asks for very little attention. A person chooses a journey and moves as they normally would while their phone or watch records the distance. The app does not prescribe a route or need to remain open. When the traveler returns, their movement reveals a waypoint with story context, a quotation, and artwork.
The goal is for the application to recede. It should feel like a companion to walking and reading, not a system directing someone through a checklist.
The approach
Artwork became an important part of the experience. Rather than rely on AI-generated images, we chose public-domain illustrations created for these books across generations. My partner researched and curated the artwork, which brought history, personality, and human judgment to the journeys. The choice also clarified for me where AI can help without replacing human work.
That decision also created a content-engineering problem. Each image must be checked, matched to the right moment, credited, prepared for mobile use, and kept available offline. I built the content model that connects every book, waypoint, quotation, source, and image.
Synchronization was the other major challenge. A traveler can be online or offline, signed in or signed out, and using free, purchased, or subscription content. The app must preserve local progress, add cloud features after sign-in, recover cleanly when a connection returns, and keep access rights separate from cached content.
Health data, purchases, authentication, local storage, and cloud synchronization each have different rules and failure modes. I treated them as explicit state transitions so the systems could agree without asking the traveler to understand them. StoryTrek uses only health-derived distance, not a person’s route, location, or broader health record.
What we built
- A shared Flutter application for iOS and Android
- Apple Health and Android health-platform integration
- A structured library of literary journeys and waypoints
- A public-domain artwork and content pipeline for each journey
- On-device progress and journaling
- Offline and online behavior for signed-in and signed-out travelers
- Entitlement-aware synchronization and shared company journeys
- Free journeys, individual purchases, and a library subscription