RowRiver: Rowing Machine Maps

zava75

About this app

Turn your rowing machine into a real boat, on a real river.

RowRiver connects to your rower over Bluetooth and takes you along the actual course of twelve rivers around the world. Every metre you row is a metre travelled on the map: the route is not invented, it follows the river's real geography, bend after bend.

THE TWELVE RIVERS

• Thames — London
• Tiber — Rome
• Seine — Paris
• Arno — Florence
• Po — Turin
• Amstel — Amsterdam
• Danube — Vienna
• Charles — Boston
• Mississippi — New Orleans
• Sumida — Tokyo
• Kamo — Kyoto
• Nile — Cairo

144 LANDMARKS, TOLD OUT LOUD

Every river has twelve points of interest: bridges, palaces, cathedrals and famous views from the area. As you row, the app brings them to you one at a time, shows them and reads them aloud, so you never have to take your eyes off the stroke. They do not always appear at their exact spot on the map: they are spread along the whole route, so they keep you company from the first kilometre to the last. It is not a list of names: it is a small guide to the places you are rowing through, unfolding while you train.

THE WORKOUT

• Free, distance, time and calorie modes
• Ghost pacer: a reference pace to chase
• Live data: distance, time, strokes per minute, total strokes, calories, heart rate
• Heart rate from a chest strap or from the rower itself
• The screen stays on and the session keeps running in the background

YOUR ROWER

Works with Bluetooth rowers that speak the FTMS standard, used by most recent machines.
There is also Concept2 PM5 support: it is written and working in the code, but I have not yet been able to test it on a real machine. If you own one, your feedback is worth a lot to me.

AFTER THE WORKOUT

• Full session history
• Personal leaderboard of your best results
• GPX export: your row becomes a track you can open and share wherever you like

WHAT YOU WILL NOT FIND

• No ads
• No subscription
• No account and no sign-up
• No data collection: your workouts and profile stay on your phone, there is no server for them to land on

I wrote RowRiver because I wanted to use it myself, not to run banners on it.

PRICING

RowRiver is completely free today. A future update will keep your first 10 workouts free; to carry on after that, a one-time unlock of €5.99 (or the local price in your country) is all it takes, paid once and valid for good, with no renewals. If you install now you lose nothing: your 10 free workouts will start counting from that update, and the ones you row before it are not counted towards the 10.

REQUIREMENTS

A Bluetooth rowing machine. An internet connection for the maps. Android 8.0 or later.

Available in English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.

What’s new

Better translations in German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese. After a few real workouts, RowRiver may ask you to rate it on Google Play. You can simply close the window.