Runiverse.
More than a Running app
Runiverse turns running and walking into a territory game. Your route becomes ground on a shared map, alongside rankings, clubs, and organised runs.
The finish line is
one beginning.
Follow a sample route from the phone to the map. Each step has a different responsibility.
01 / Record the route
The sample route starts on the phone. Recording and uploading are different steps.
This is a controlled illustration. It does not connect to Runiverse.
Something to take
back from a run.
The illustration above separates a saved activity, ownership processing, and map publication. The existing product artwork here shows the shareable side of an activity.
Ownership and published tiles have separate write boundaries. Publication is manual in the documented workflow; a saved run does not mean the visible map is already current.
A tiny detour
Claim three little pieces of this page.
A small map. A very short run.
A college assignment ended. We decided the idea hadn't.
The product matters. So do the people and decisions that got it out of the classroom.
What we put into the world
Meet, Daksh, and I kept building Runiverse after our five-person course project. Today, the app lets someone turn a run or walk into territory on a shared map. We put it in the app stores and tested it with runners in open beta. Their feedback gave us real problems to solve.
The work nobody sees on a run
A route can be interrupted, a phone can lose its connection, and the map can take time to catch up. I led work on recording activities and the territory behind them. The point is simple: if someone goes for a run, the app should have a trustworthy account of it.
The rooms it took us into
Runiverse also put me in meetings with people at Adani Sportsline, KD Hospital, IIT Gandhinagar, and DA-IICT. I represented our company, explained what we were building, and worked through conversations about collaboration and negotiation. A runner, a brand, and an investor each ask a different question. I had to learn how to answer the one actually in the room.
Still learning
The company has taught me how to discuss stakes, protect its reputation, and keep working when the answer is not already written down. We're still building the product and learning from those conversations. That is a bigger education than the original assignment promised.
The course ended. The project didn’t.
Runiverse began in a five-person OOP course team. The original idea came from within that group. After submission, Meet Dhorajiya, Daksh Amalseda, and I decided to continue.
We tested in open beta and reached runners through our network and friends of friends. Their feedback helped us find what needed work. Seeing us solve those problems kept me interested.
A run has to survive the messy bits.
The screen says start, run, finish. The phone can send noisy location points, restart halfway through, or time out during upload after the server has already accepted an activity.
I led the tracking work behind those cases. Route points are written into a journal, then merged with points still in memory when the activity finishes. A restart no longer means the current memory buffer is the only route we have to work with.
A retry should still be the same run.
Before upload, the app assigns an activity identity and saves a pending copy. Retries carry that identity forward. The backend checks for an existing keyed activity and declares a unique index for that user and key.
The saved activity then passes territory work to UNI-X through a separate pending-work record. Each stage has its own recovery rules. A successfully saved run is one step in getting the right territory onto the map.
The work grew beyond the app.
Building Runiverse brought conversations about runners, collaborators, and investors into my week. I'm still reserved, but I've learned to explain the same product differently depending on who is listening.
Ownership updates and the published Mapbox map are separate. The map can lag until tiles are manually published, and recovery across all the independent writes is still being improved. Those boundaries are part of the work, not a footnote.
Things the work
taught me.
Intentions don’t matter. Outcomes do.
A good explanation cannot recover a run or make the right territory appear. What the runner gets is the test.
There is always a bigger fish in the sea.
Meeting people with more experience has made me prepare better and keep learning.
The same idea needs different words.
Runners, collaborators, and investors care about different stakes. Representing a company means understanding those stakes before speaking.