Recce

Surface data in route planners is mostly guesswork, and I don’t think that’s a bug anyone’s about to fix. Getting reliable surface certainty from map data alone is a hard problem, probably not solvable in the current state of things.

So Recce doesn’t pretend it knows. The assumption instead is that the only reliable source is those who have actually ridden it. You go out, mark what’s really under your tyres, record a voice memo or a photo at the spot, flag the section worth coming back for. Then that knowledge exists, and you might want to share it.

Which is why the riding side matters as much as the scouting side. It has things other apps put behind a subscription, offline maps, voice navigation, turn-by-turn. Recce is for people going far and past network coverage, so those aren’t premium features in that context, they’re the baseline. No reason to ship a worse ride to get the data.

Recce is NOT a route planner, and I’m not trying to make it one. It’s the layer that tells you whether the plan was true.

Solo build, on the App Store, scouting invite-only while I find out what’s broken.

An obvious hole to me is the cold start. The “rider-marked” data is worth little until enough riders mark things. But the annotations are useful to you whether or not anyone else ever sees them. Voice memo, photo, video pinned to the spot on the route you rode, so it doubles as a journal of the day. That works with one user. Sharing is the upside, not the assumption.