If you’ve ever ridden a moped or scooter through a major European city, you know the feeling. You open a standard navigation app, punch in your destination, and immediately find yourself routed onto a massive highway or a bone-rattling cobblestone street that threatens to shake your scooter to pieces.
I’m Roel, a Dutch developer living in Berlin. For years, I worked as a consultant, architect, and developer for massive enterprise corporations — companies like Mercedes Benz, ING, Rabobank, Rijkswaterstaat, Essent, De Nederlandsche Bank, and Kone. I spent my days building complex software systems that had to work flawlessly at scale.
But outside of work, I was dealing with a completely different kind of system failure: getting around my own city.
The Spark: A Love-Hate Relationship with City Commuting
My daily driver in Berlin is a UNU electric scooter. Aesthetically, I love it. Practically? It’s complicated. If you own one, you probably know the struggles — lots of technical issues, a total lack of support, and zero response to warranty claims. It looks incredible, but it requires patience.
The UNU electric scooter — looks great, but navigating the city required a better tool.. Source: Unu
However, the scooter itself wasn't the biggest problem. The real issue was the routing.
While working as a Lead Technical Software Engineer at Epam, I relied on my scooter to commute. I quickly realized that traditional navigation apps like Google Maps have a massive blind spot. They treat a scooter traveling at 45 km/h exactly the same as a car, or they group it in with bicycles. There is no middle ground for micromobility.
Berlin's infamous cobblestones — a nightmare for scooter riders using standard car GPS.. Source: Grüne Xhain
Taking the Leap: Building the iOS App (May 2025)
I decided to fix it myself. I stepped away from the corporate enterprise world to focus entirely on building my own applications, starting with a solution for this exact problem.
In May 2025, development on Urban Rider officially began for iOS.
Transitioning from leading enterprise teams to becoming a solo indie developer is a wild ride. Suddenly, you aren't just writing code; you are the product manager, the QA tester, the marketing department, and the customer support team.
The early days were a mix of immense fun and heavy stress. Figuring out a custom routing algorithm that specifically filters out bad road surfaces and highway traffic for vehicles moving between 20-45 km/h was a massive challenge. But the first time I took the alpha build out on the Berlin streets and it flawlessly routed me around a notorious cobblestone trap, I knew I had something special.
Expanding the Fleet: Launching on Android (April 2026)
The response to the iOS version was incredible, but immediately, the requests started pouring in: "When is it coming to Android?"
In April 2026, I fired up Android Studio, dusted off my Kotlin skills, and started building the Android version of Urban Rider. Moving across platforms brought its own set of hurdles, getting the background location tracking to work efficiently without draining the battery, navigating the Google Play Store approval processes, and ensuring the UI felt native to Android users.
But seeing the app run smoothly across both major ecosystems made every late-night coding session worth it.
The Road Ahead
Building Urban Rider has been one of the most challenging and rewarding projects of my career. It took everything I learned building high-stakes software for banks and automotive giants, and applied it to a problem that everyday commuters face on the streets of Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and beyond.
We are just getting started. If you ride a moped, e-scooter, or any micromobility vehicle, Urban Rider is built specifically for you — to keep you safe, keep you off the cobblestones, and get you where you're going.
Join the Journey The best part of indie development is the direct connection with the people using the app. We have a small, growing, and incredibly passionate community on Reddit over at r/urbanriders. Whether you want to request a new feature, report a bug, or just share your commuting setup, come join us.
Ride safe, and let Urban Rider handle the route.