Runish

The pitch

Running apps track you. Runish plays with you. The map is the game board, your legs are the controller, and every run you log is a move — claim routes, collect stamps, level up, and leave times for friends to chase.

Why I’m making it

I run, and I know the motivation curve: week one is easy, week four is willpower, week eight is silence. Trackers give you graphs; graphs don’t get you out the door. Games do. The trick is that a running game can’t demand you show up at 7 PM like a multiplayer lobby — it has to be async. You run when you run, your friends run when they run, and the game weaves the competition together afterwards.

How I’m building it

Runish is a pnpm monorepo: a React + Capacitor app, Firebase Functions for the backend, and — the genuinely hard part — custom native Capacitor plugins for GPS run tracking and HealthKit. Reliable background GPS on iOS is unforgiving; the tracker plugin manages location sessions, pause detection and battery behavior natively, then hands clean route data to the game layer.

The map is Mapbox, styled so your claimed routes and stamps read like game territory rather than a fitness chart. Runs are scored server-side from the raw GPS trace — distance, pace, route matching for challenges — which keeps the async leaderboards honest.

Follow the build in the devlog.