Championing a Fast & Reliable Mobile Application in Boat Racing

Coderus created a pioneering mobile app that offered the ultimate confidence to Land Rover BAR – as a secure, resilient and reliable app during their Challenge for the 35th America’s Cup.

Client: Great Britain’s Royal Yacht Squadron | Land Rover BAR
Industry: Marine | Sports

At a Glance

  • Mobile and embedded sensor solutions were required.
  • The software was crafted to keep pace with real time events.
  • We used an agile methodology to deliver the project in only six months.
  • The tech was delivered on a tablet and smart watch.
We needed an app to act as a virtual seventh crew member and become central to our team, providing Ben and I with the valuable data to gain a competitive advantage. We’ve had great support from BT and Coderus throughout.
Giles Scott
Land Rover BAR

The Challenge

Land Rover BAR, British Challengers for the 35th America’s Cup, required a pioneering new mobile app that could intuitively show critical information throughout the racing – with no user interaction.

The boat itself is embedded with hundreds of sensors, providing real-time data that will allow the team to make swift tactical decisions and optimise their time in the water. 

Data from the sensors is served to the Coderus app, which enables critical data to be read in a user-friendly format from the crew’s water-resistant Android tablets and watches.

Optimised for challenging race conditions, hardware and battery performance, and crafted to ensure its operation kept pace with events as they unfolded, the Coderus mobile app solution was used through the America’s Cup racing calendar.

The Methodology

The Land Rover BAR team chose the Android tablet and Android Wear devices to meet the challenging conditions presented. 

With the rapid and agile development of the app, our sprints of developing and testing were scheduled for a standard two-week duration. Running in the background during testing, Crashlytics Beta allowed us to quickly identify the causes of any crashes or failure and apply solutions for the next release.

During development, Coderus worked remotely and sustainably across time zones with the Land Rover BAR team, a fantastic example of collaboration between the U.K. and Bermuda.

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The Tech_

  • We create a native Android application.
  • We created a smart watch app using WearOS.
  • Multiple smart watches were connected to a tablet to give the sailors access to critical information as they moved around the boat.
  • A custom scene graph engine was developed to display on screen visualisations
  • A recording and replay feature was implemented to allow data sent to the app to be captured and replayed at a later date.
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The Results

Our ground-breaking mobile app for Land Rover BAR brought a unique solution to one of the most difficult and high-profile technology problems in high-performance racing.


After three months of agile development sprints and testing sessions followed by three months of maintenance, our app was designed to provide the team with critical data about the strategic layout of the course, the position of the boat, how many legs of the race were left and the time and distance to the next boundary – all allowing the team to make swift tactical decisions and giving them maximum time for manoeuvring. 


Our app was also designed to tell the team exactly when to power up, allowing them to cross the start line on the very second the race began, gaining a critical advantage by getting the team in front at Mark 1.


The technology works on a tablet screen and a smartwatch, offering the crew real-time information about the sailing course. Onboard the boat the team used highly water-resistant Android tablets and watches, while data was collected via hundreds of sensors. The app recorded the relevant data and its own state; if an issue arose during development, this was forwarded to our team, allowing us to continuously improve the functionality.


All in all, we created a pioneering mobile app that offered the ultimate confidence to Land Rover BAR – as a secure, resilient and reliable app during their Challenge for the 35th America’s Cup.


The Land Rover BAR team reported that the battery performance per device allowed a day’s racing – with up to four races per day. What’s more, our app facilitated the team in being the most tactical leading up to the start of each race and the fastest over the line when countdown finished.

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If you’ve got an app or piece of software in mind, get in touch with us today to start your project.