My Wild Patch

Mushrooms, berries, nuts: mark where you found them, record your route, log what you picked, and check the weather before you go. Never lose a good spot again. All kept privately on your device.

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Inspiration

Foraging is hugely popular in Slovenia. Every year I go out for wild asparagus and chestnuts, and every year I run into the same frustration. I can never remember exactly where that one spot was, the patch where I picked twenty asparagus spears in a one go.

So I decided to build an app that saves the exact location, so that next spring I can walk straight back to it.

What it does

My Wild Patch lets you save any spot worth returning to: a chestnut tree, a porcini patch, a blueberry bush, a stretch of wild strawberries.

  • Harvest log. On each location you record what you actually picked, so you can look back at previous years, compare yields, and see when in the season a spot is worth visiting.
  • Recorded paths. When the find is a route rather than a point (a trail lined with wild strawberries, or a slope covered in chestnuts), you can record the whole path instead of a single pin.
  • Map and compass. Saved locations are marked on the map, and a compass shows the direction you are heading. The map switches between terrain and satellite views, depending on whether you want to read the landscape or recognise it.
  • Weather. Current conditions and a forecast, so you can decide whether today is the day.

Your saved spots stay on your device. Your spots are yours.

How we built it

My Wild Patch is Android-only for now. It is written in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose and follows an MVVM architecture, with Room for local storage and Google Maps for the map itself.

As a solo developer, I work with Claude, which speeds up the build considerably and, just as importantly, keeps the momentum going on a project with no one else to answer to.

Challenges we ran into

This idea is at least a year old. The hardest part was never the code. It was finding the time and the motivation to actually finish a hobby project.

The most unfamiliar work was marketing. I had never dealt with any of it before, and I had to step out of my comfort zone. I still have a lot to learn there. Wiring up the various SDKs and APIs was demanding too, but that part was fun.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Actually shipping a hobby project instead of leaving it on the shelf forever, which is where projects like this usually end up. And getting every SDK and API integration working to bring the app to where it is now.

What we learned

That anything can be done once you commit to a goal. I have always worked in teams of several people; this is the first app I have built and published to a store entirely on my own.

What's next for My Wild Patch

  • Seasonality calendar showing what is in season nearby.
  • Offline maps, since signal disappears the moment you are properly out in nature.
  • Sharing spots with friends via deep links.
  • A home-screen widget with seasonality information and the saved location worth checking next.
  • Statistics charting your harvests across the years, so you can see whether a spot is improving, holding steady, or quietly being picked out by someone else.
  • Design refinements, feature upgrades, and, inevitably, bug fixing once more people start using it.

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