Hunterly — A Smart Hunting Assistant (Android App)
Hunterly is a smart hunting assistant that turns the weather forecast, wind, barometric pressure, the moon's phases, solunar periods and the mating season into one clear hunt score from 0 to 100 for your spot and day — telling you whether the day is worth the trip and which window is best. A native Android app I designed and built from the ground up, available in Croatian and English, free with unobtrusive ads and an ad-free PRO option.
- Hunt score from 0–100 for your chosen spot and day, computed from weather, air pressure, wind direction, lunar phases, solunar periods and the mating season
- Clear recommendations: which species are active, the best window (dawn or dusk), and how the wind blows relative to your stand
- Wind compass — the wind direction at your stand, so game does not catch your scent
- A game-species database with closed seasons, descriptions, habitats, mating season and a year-round hunting calendar
- A map with custom hunting-ground layers and your saved stands and locations
- A catch journal with photo, place and weight, plus a trophy record (CIC points, medals, measurements)
- A morning alarm and a home-screen widget
- Works offline; Croatian and English; free with an ad-free PRO option and no locked features
Hunterly is a mobile application I designed and built from the ground up to answer the question every hunter asks before heading out: is today worth it, when, and for which game. Instead of forcing the user to juggle weather forecasts, pressure and wind data, lunar phases and species behaviour on their own, the app pulls all of these sources together and distils them into one clear, easy-to-read hunt score. The goal of the project was to make complex data about weather and game accessible to beginners and seasoned hunters alike, in their own native language and with closed-season information always at hand.
I built the app as a native Android application in Kotlin using modern Jetpack Compose and Material 3 design with a custom "dark camo" palette. I also handled the entire publishing process on the Google Play Store — from preparing all marketing assets, descriptions and localised screenshots to integrating the ad system and the PRO purchase, and setting up the data-safety and privacy declarations.
At the heart of the app is a custom hunt-scoring engine that calculates a rating from 0 to 100 for every day. The engine factors in barometric pressure and its trends, temperature and temperature swings, wind direction, lunar phases, solunar activity windows, dawn and dusk, and the mating season of each species. For hunting, wind direction is decisive — the wind must blow from the game toward the hunter, not the other way around — so I built a dedicated wind compass that, at your stand, shows how the wind blows relative to the expected approach of game, so it does not catch your scent.
On the data side, the app holds a game-species database with full closed-season and species data for Croatia (per NN 94/19), with new European countries added in every update. For each species the app provides a description, habitat, mating season and a year-round hunting calendar, along with a clear indication of whether the species is in season or closed today. The closed-season data is deliberately built to be easily and regularly updatable, because an error in a closed season can put the user in breach of the law — with a clear disclaimer that Hunterly is an aid, not a legal source.
Functionally, the app is far more than a forecast. It includes a map with custom hunting-ground layers on which the user marks their stands and saved locations, a catch journal that records every outing with a photo, place, weight and notes, and a trophy record with CIC points, medals and measurements. I also added a morning alarm and a home-screen widget that shows today's hunt score at a glance. The whole app is built around an offline-first principle — thanks to local caching it works even without an internet connection, which is crucial out in the field where signal is often missing.
Hunterly is free and includes every feature with unobtrusive ads; anyone who prefers to use it without ads can buy the PRO version (a one-time purchase) that removes all ads, with no locked features or limits. The closed-season data stays completely free and behind no paywall, in both the free and PRO versions. Privacy comes first — user data stays stored on the device. Across this project I led the entire development cycle — from architecture and database design, through the integration of weather and solunar sources, the hunt-scoring algorithm and the user interface, all the way to localisation, store-asset preparation and publishing the app on Google Play.
Technologies: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material 3, MVVM architecture, Room (local database, journal, trophies and offline cache), Retrofit and OkHttp (networking), Navigation Compose, a map with custom WMS hunting-ground layers, CameraX (catch photos), Coil, DataStore, WorkManager (alarms and widget updates), Glance (widget), orientation sensors (wind compass), suncalc (solunar and lunar calculations), Open-Meteo (weather forecast), Google Play Billing (PRO), and AdMob with UMP consent (ads and consent).
