JOYRIDE – Mobile App for Car Enhusiasts

2023 - Current

JOYRIDE was born from a shared passion between my friend and me - two car enthusiasts who wanted a platform to discover and share the best driving routes. Realizing there was little solutions catering to this need, we decided to create our own. We quickly brought two more friends on board, and after validating the idea with positive user feedback, we moved to the UX/UI design phase, where I took the lead to ensure an intuitive and visually engaging experience.

The app

As the project leader, I oversee the team, manage development, and contribute to coding and design, ensuring the app’s vision aligns with our community's needs. Initially, we started with FlutterFlow, but quickly switched to React Native with Expo for more flexibility and control. For mapping, we transitioned from Apple Maps and Google Maps to Mapbox for better customization and advanced features, such as precise location tracking and high-performance routing. To ensure a seamless and scalable experience, JOYRIDE is built using modern technologies:

• Expo (React Native) – Cross-platform app development
• Appwrite – Backend and database management
• Mapbox – Advanced mapping and navigation features
• NativeWind – Styling for a responsive and efficient UI

JOYRIDE is not just a tool for discovering roads; it’s a social platform for road enthusiasts. Users can record and share their routes, create new road segments, and plan group drives. The interactive map allows them to explore and connect with new routes and fellow enthusiasts.

Challenges

The journey wasn’t without its challenges. One of the key obstacles we faced was determining how to check if a user had driven through an already recorded segment. We needed a reliable method to compare the user's route with existing segments, ensuring accurate detection and analysis. This required innovative solutions in data analysis, geometric calculations, and spatial reasoning to provide a smooth and accurate experience for our users. We’re proud of how we've tackled this challenge, allowing us to offer features that feel intuitive and reliable.
Beyond that, building this app was a huge learning experience. While I had some prior React knowledge, I had never developed a mobile app before. We had to learn almost everything from scratch—how to work with Mapbox, Appwrite, and many other technologies. But because we love the learning process and grinding through challenges, we never stopped pushing forward. Every hurdle became an opportunity to grow, and that passion is reflected in the app we're building.

Marketing

To engage with our audience early and build a strong community around JOYRIDE, we’ve been actively showcasing our progress on our Instagram and other social platforms. Our marketing strategy focuses on sharing high-quality car photos, exciting driving videos, and behind-the-scenes content that highlights how the app works in real-world driving experiences. By consistently posting engaging content, we are attracting like-minded enthusiasts who share our love for great roads and driving adventures. One of our videos even gained 180K views, proving the strong interest in what we’re building. This early traction has helped us validate our idea further and grow a dedicated following, ensuring that when we launch, we already have an engaged user base ready to hit the road with JOYRIDE

Connecting with users

At JOYRIDE, we’re all about creating a community. We believe that our users are more than just app subscribers—they’re part of a broader culture of car enthusiasts. To build a stronger connection with our community, we organize car photography sessions with potential users, capturing their vehicles in stunning settings while showcasing the capabilities of the JOYRIDE. These sessions serve as an opportunity to not only build relationships but also to receive valuable feedback and insight into how we can continue improving our app. It's these kinds of connections that fuel our ambition for what we’re building.

Current phase

We’re almost ready with our minimum viable product, and we've already gathered valuable user feedback that’s helping us refine our features and ensure we’re meeting the needs of our users. User testing is already underway, and we’re making sure every feature works as intended before launch. We’re finalizing everything and preparing for the app’s official release, which is coming soon. We’ve come a long way, and we can’t wait to share the JOYRIDE with car enthusiasts everywhere. We’re confident it will become the go-to platform for discovering, sharing, and connecting over the love of the road.