Biko: GPS Bike Tracker

Inspiration

We see the bike as our everyday companion for commuting, clearing our heads, enjoying a hobby ride, exploring the wild, and pushing our boundaries. Cars quietly add more CO₂ and pollution to the air every day. We wanted to highlight how a small change, leaving the car parked and taking the bike for everyday trips, can make a difference.

What it does

Our main goal was to make every ride more enjoyable while showing the impact of choosing a bike. Biko makes it easy to track your rides and see the difference each one makes. You can follow your route, check key ride stats, and see how much CO₂ you avoid by choosing your bike instead of a car. Everything is kept simple and private. No account is required, and your ride data stays with you.

How we built it

We chose Flutter so Biko can be available on both Android and iOS from one codebase. The app is built around lightweight components and on-device storage, keeping it fast, affordable to maintain. The GPS engine was one of our biggest focuses. We built our own ride metrics logic to handle inaccurate GPS points, slow movement, elevation noise and pauses more reliably.

Challenges we ran into

Waiting patiently for App Store and Play Store reviews.
Fighting the feeling that every AI-generated app starts to look the same.
Getting GPS tracking right is much harder than it looks.
We had to remove features and visual ideas that looked great in demos but made the real product worse. Learning what not to ship was just as important as building new things.
And, of course, fighting the default app theme color, which is always easier when you're not alone. :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a GPS engine that we validated against real rides and existing trackers.
Rides are saved even if your battery dies.
We created a smooth Flyover experience without rebuilding the UI every frame.
We deliberately removed features that didn't fit the core idea instead of adding them just because we could.

What we learned

AI is incredibly powerful, and sometimes we realized that we were becoming the bottleneck rather than the technology. We also learned that constraints can be useful. Deciding that Biko should not depend on a server pushed us toward better local solutions. And most importantly, it’s always better to have a team. Even if there are only two of us. Because there will be moments when you both run out of energy, and that’s when having someone by your side matters most.

What's next for Biko

This is just the beginning. The next chapter is where the real journey starts:

Growing the community, one rider and one ride at a time.
Discovering new ways to turn everyday cycling into meaningful, eco-friendly action.
Putting Biko into more people’s hands, learning from every ride, and shaping the product together around one simple belief: Make cycling an everyday choice. Make every ride count. And always keep your data yours.