Product overview
What it is
Crag Topo is a climbing guidebook in your pocket. You browse crags, pick a sector, look at a topo photo with the routes drawn on it, read the description, and log what you climbed.
The reference point is Rockfax — the guidebook publisher and its app, which is what most UK climbers currently open at the crag. "Drop-in replacement" means someone should be able to switch to Crag Topo and not miss anything they were relying on.
Who it is for
The person we are building for is standing at the bottom of a crag. They are:
- Offline, or nearly. One bar of EE at Stanage. Sometimes nothing at all in a Peak valley.
- In a hurry. They want the grade and the line, not a loading spinner.
- Not reading carefully. Cold hands, low sun on the screen, a rope in the other hand.
- Coming back later to log what they did, from the pub or the car.
Everything below follows from that person, not from a product manager at a desk.
What "drop-in replacement" commits us to
| Rockfax does | We must | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Show crags, sectors, routes with grades and star ratings | Yes | Phase 1 |
| Draw route lines on topo photos | Yes — this is the core artefact | Phase 1 |
| Work with no signal once a crag is downloaded | Yes, and more aggressively | Phase 1 |
| Log ascents with style and date | Yes | Phase 2 |
| Approach and parking information | Yes | Phase 1 |
| Access and nesting restrictions | Yes — this one is a safety and access issue, not a nicety | Phase 1 |
| Paid guidebook content | Undecided. Content licensing is an open question, not a technical one | — |
And things we intend to do that Rockfax does not, which is the actual reason to build this:
- Ticking with the people you climbed with. Climbing is a two-person activity recorded as if it were solitary. Tag your partners; the tick appears on both logbooks.
- Wishlists that are actually usable — routes you want, sorted by where you are going.
- Route lines on the live camera. Point the phone at the wall, see the lines.
- 3D renders of a sector for the approach and for picking a line from below.
These are on the wishlist and the later phases of the roadmap. None of them are committed.
What it is not
- Not a social network. Tagging partners is about accuracy of the record, not a feed.
- Not a training app. No hangboard timers, no projected-grade analytics.
- Not crowd-sourced-first. The route data is curated; user contributions are a later, moderated layer. Getting a grade wrong in a guidebook is a safety problem, and "the crowd will fix it" is not an answer at an E5 belay.
- Not Android or web. Not yet, and not without an ADR.
The three things that make it good
- It works with no signal. Not "has an offline mode" — it is offline by construction. See Offline-first.
- It feels like iOS. Liquid Glass, SF Symbols, native tabs, the system's own gestures and haptics. Not a website in a wrapper. See iOS native feel.
- The topo is the hero. The photo with the lines on it is the thing people came for; everything else is chrome around it.
Related
- Product principles — the rules we use to settle arguments
- Data model primer — crag, sector, route, in plain language
- Roadmap — what, in what order
- Mockups — what the screens look like