Gold Rush Fitness
An Oregon Trail-themed iOS step tracker. Hit your goals and the wagon rolls on. Miss them and you die of dysentery.
One weekend, one wagon
Built at HoosHack 2026, UVA's hackathon, with three teammates over a single weekend. The premise wrote itself: your real step count moves a wagon across the trail, and the game leans all the way into the Oregon Trail bit, dysentery and all. The point was to make a fitness app that a person would actually open twice.
What it does
It pulls real-time step data straight from Apple HealthKit and drives an animated wagon scene with trail progress and a seven-day step heatmap. Goals come in three tiers: Rest Stop at three thousand steps, Halfway at six, Full Trail at ten. There is hydration logging, party health stats, and a badge system that unlocks at trail milestones.
The whole thing shipped in one weekend.Running on a physical iPhone by Sunday — HealthKit will not run in a simulator.
The stack, and the physical-phone catch
React Native and Expo on the front end, FastAPI behind it, PostgreSQL for storage, JWT for auth, and HealthKit wired in through Nitro modules. That last piece forced the whole team onto a physical iPhone, since HealthKit refuses to run in the simulator. Hackathons are their own kind of problem: the scope is deliberately small, the clock is brutal, and the only real success criterion is that something runs by the end of the weekend. This one did.