Excuse my delayed response to this -- I spent a lovely week exploring York with a friend and just about managed to get everything back in order!
I am a little unclear what this app hopes to achieve. Bear with me, I have not used walk guides for many years and their relevance to walking compared to rock climbing guides bear no comparison. The OS map tells me where I am allowed to go, and holds most of the detail to inform me of what to expect. The Ramblers with their dependency on guided walks to collect membership as their inner core squandered their pre-war wealth and have failed to harness the power of the independent walker.
Take an example; the Breidden Hills on the Shropshire Welsh border. Most walks start at the Criggion Village Hall car park because most walkers are induced into climbing Rodneys Pillar. Otherwise, they start at Middletown, which splits a very interesting enclosed area of terrain. I have yet to hear anyone mention Kempster's hill that has some very interesting features. When I try to use terms such as destinations, objectives, fixed assets and infrastructure I usually get blank off because as walkers we have no geographical knowledge common to the whole of our interest that brings together the hill walker, long-distance walker and daywalker being able to understand the finer points of the locations they walk through.
Kemptster's Hill, when linked to the Bytherig and the Melverley Bridge produces a fine range of linear routes that exploit little-used local public transport. If some of these assets were better understood, even the local authorities might wake up to the commercial potential of our access network.
I would debate the point on OS maps advising you where you're
allowed to go, based on a number of disputes I have had with angry landowners in the past
. But for the most part, I agree with you
The way Wander works is by taking your current location as the start point for your walk -- that means even if you aren't in the most common start point for a walk, you might still get some suitable results suggested for you nearby. The intention is not to provide you with a cookie-cutter style walk which is marked with some very convenient red/yellow/green markers all the way round, the intention is to give you some waypoints to look forward to along the way. Currently it's far more primitive than the geographical knowledge you describe, there is potential to include those kind of considerations in the routing logic.
Regarding public transport, I've deliberately placed that kind of granularity out-of-scope for the app -- there are far more established alternatives that have these kind of things included
Herein lies the main problem with so may guide type Apps.
I recently bought climbing guide a book, from st Ives publishing, written by a local. It was purely because of the local knowledge that I spent my hard earn on it. I can get all the basic generic stuff from many other sources these days. Unlike the previous post I think this can apply to walking and any other type of guide.
With a specialised local App that you can add a USP to. Such as Tin Mines in Cornwall. You create something people can't get easily from some where else. The choice is how specialised and how local. Too much compromise on making your App special enough to create interest and it is simply overwhelmed by the big boys all ready out there. The whole Wainwright industry started from a blokes local knowledge and a guide book.
Indeed, the granularity of the app is something questionable, but that's not the intended USP of the app -- to my knowledge, there is nothing out there at the moment that does the same as Wander -- basing suggestions around your own personal capacity for a walk -- lots of navigation apps and the like allow you to plan your own route with waypoints and the like, but few advise you on where you'd like these waypoints to be.
Without going into too much detail, the app harnesses a lot of local datasources to gather the results, so there hopefully is the capacity to harness some similar knowledge there -- of course not to the standard of a bespoke guidebook, but for the more casual walker perhaps, or for areas without such guidebooks being available.
I've moved this discussion to a separate thread in the general space, as not to repurpose the welcome board for this -- more than happy to discuss more with you over there!
https://www.walkingforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=42409
