Offline-first mobile product
Critterboard
An insect hunting game for iOS and Android that identifies 1,000 Central European insects and spiders on the phone itself: no account, no cloud dependency, and nothing leaves the device by default.
The brief
A product problem worth solving.
Make a playful field companion that works deep in a forest with no signal and respects privacy by design, while leaving room for optional social features without making the core experience depend on a network connection.
The work
Built as a system, not just a surface.
I trained a compact regional species model on openly licensed photos and run it on-device through ExecuTorch, shipped together with an offline PMTiles map of Europe as a one-time 145 MB region pack. Three AI guide personas chat about each find using Gemma 4 E2B running locally. Game progression (XP, quests, badges, streaks) lives in local state, and an opt-in Cloudflare backend adds pseudonymous leaderboards, friends, and shared sightings that can be deleted at any time. Observations export as Darwin Core for GBIF.
The result
A live, useful product.
An open-source, MIT-licensed app heading for its European beta, with on-device recognition at 78% top-1 and 90% top-3 accuracy, four languages, and a live Cloudflare backend for optional networked play.
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