Hiking Passport

Hiking Passport uses Apple Health to build adaptive hiking training around your life, then stamps every hike completed into a beautiful passport.

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Inspiration

Hiking Passport started with a walking challenge: 20,000 steps a day for a month (~10 miles/day). The most I had ever walked was 5 miles. I started hiking and ended that month on the summit of South Sister, a 14-mile, 5,000-foot-elevation hike.

I am disabled, with hearing loss and insomnia, so I have spent my life finding unconventional ways to do ordinary things. Every year, my training looks different. In 2025, insomnia left me with only enough energy to skip a stair every time I walked up a staircase. That alone helped me cut 1 hour and 18 minutes from my summit time.

That is when it clicked: I did not need a conventional training plan. I needed one that could adapt to my life. Taking the stairs, pushing a stroller, or carrying groceries can all build toward a hard hike.

I am not the only person facing these barriers. One in four U.S. adults has a disability, and 63 million Americans are family caregivers. For millions of people, hiking is limited by time, energy, transportation, caregiving, or access—not motivation.

Hiking Passport turns those barriers into accommodations. The plan bends. Your hiking goals do not have to.

How I built it

The project was built in Xcode using Swift and SwiftUI. My main goal was to draw the passport landscape natively in Swift rather than rely on static images or vectors. I initially experimented with a generative AI approach, but the results were not consistent or controllable enough. Because the passport is a live canvas that updates whenever health data changes, I needed every part of the landscape to be generated and positioned dynamically.

I integrated RevenueCat to manage the Pro plan and paywall. The app uses Apple Health to build personalized milestones, with daily training suggestions from Apple Intelligence. I also built an Apple Watch companion because the app encourages users to track their hikes on the watch.

Challenges I ran into

The hardest part was drawing the passport landscape. I had to build jagged mountain shapes that looked natural, figure out how multiple mountains could layer on top of each other, and make easier hikes appear as hills while harder hikes became larger mountains. I also created custom shading for the meadow to make a flat SwiftUI canvas feel like rolling terrain.

Then I had to make the entire passport accessible. Dynamic Type changed how much text could fit on the landscape, VoiceOver required the visual scene to be translated into meaningful descriptions, and Reduce Motion changed how the passport animated. The same landscape also had to remain legible on iPhone, Apple Watch, widgets, and the app icon.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Accommodating 55+ barriers to access with personalized training modifications.
  • Seeing my creative vision for the passport come to life.

What I learned

I learned that I can create even more complex animations using agentic AI, especially in the last 3 months. The passport canvas shapes are so complex that I wouldn't have been able to do the mathematical coding by hand to make them look realistic. I tried to code the app in March, and Claude was not able to draw the mountains well enough. When I tried again in August, I was able to fully execute my vision for the passport and even add accessibility constraints to the design.

Never give up on your creative app ideas.

What's next for Hiking Passport

The next step is getting Hiking Passport ready for the iPhone Duo, since the Duo is shaped like a passport!

Built With

  • apple-intelligence
  • healthkit
  • ios
  • revenuecat
  • swift
  • swiftui
  • watchos
  • widgetkit
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