Roue Libre

Bike sharing: offline map and journeys, with no tracker.

Description

Roue Libre is an Android application that shows the bike-share stations of hundreds of cities across several countries, and computes the best journey to make with those bikes — door to door, walk → bike → walk. It is designed to be simple, efficient and privacy-friendly.

It is free software under the GPLv3, it uses no Google service, and everything but the live availability of the bikes runs on your phone.

Screenshots

Features

• 🚲 360 bike-share networks in 39 countries, 71,176 stations, from Vélib' to Auch's ten, by way of New York, Montréal, Prague, Barcelona, Dubai, Buenos Aires and Pristina. No city is a default: the application proposes the one matching your position, measured on where its stations actually are, and you choose. The full list is in docs/networks.md.

• 🗺️ A map that shows what a cyclist needs:

  • cycle ways, drawn apart from the streets;
  • public buildings and landmarks, to find your way by sight;
  • what the city lends, drawn on the bike itself: plain where the network lends only mechanical bikes, a bolt where it lends only electric ones, a bolt and a cog where it lends both;
  • and in that last case, a station saying how many of its bikes are mechanical and how many are electric, and a filter to count only the kind you are after.

• 🧭 The best journey, not the nearest station:

  • the departure and arrival stations are chosen from the live availability — bikes to take at one end, free docks to return to at the other;
  • and where the city lends both, you can even pick the bike you prefer: mechanical or electric, and only the stations that really hold one are considered;
  • the route follows the cycle ways;
  • the climb is counted and named, because a bike-share bike is heavy.

• 🪶 Light and frugal. 8.0 MB of APK, no background service, Android 8 and later.

• 🔒 Private, and local. Everything happens on the device:

  • the map, streets and routing data are downloaded once — 10.9 MB for a median city — from the releases of RoueLibre-data, a repository of this project, and that is it. What comes down is static files and nothing else: a tile archive, a routing graph, an address index. No executable, no plug-in, nothing the application runs as code;
  • that download is yours to start. Choosing a city reads the published manifest to learn what exists and what it weighs; not one byte of a dataset moves until you press the button that announces the size, and none of it ever moves in the background. The catalogue of cities is fetched the same way, when the list of cities is opened and never otherwise. Any of the three sets can also be installed from a file of your own, produced by the scripts in tools/ — see docs/offline-data.md;
  • the journey is computed on the phone;
  • searching a street or a station never leaves it — it is the most telling data the application handles, since it says where you are going;
  • once your city is installed, the only request that goes out is the network's public station feed, read straight from the operator's own server, with no Roue Libre server in between (how) — which also means the operator sees your address and the hour you asked, the price of having nobody in the middle (why we say so);
  • no telemetry, no tracker, no identifier, no history.

Installing

From Google Play, for those who prefer the usual store. Google Play signs the application with its own key, so an installation from there cannot replace one from F-Droid or from the releases page, or the other way round, without removing the application first.

From F-Droid, which rebuilds the application from this source and updates it along with the rest of the store. What it serves carries F-Droid's own signature, so an installation coming from there and one coming from the releases page cannot replace one another without removing the application first (why).

Or from the releases page: one APK per architecture — arm64-v8a for any phone of the last ten years — plus a universal one that runs on all of them.

To be told when the next version comes out, add the application to Obtainium: it watches this repository's releases and downloads the APK matching your phone, with no account and no store in between.

Building from source

You need a JDK 17 or later and the Android SDK (compileSdk 37). No key, no account and no third-party service is required.

1. Clone with the submodule. The routing engine is one; cloning without it gives a build that fails.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/mgdx/RoueLibre.git
cd RoueLibre
# on an already cloned repository:
git submodule update --init

2. Build, test, install.

./gradlew assembleDebug     # build
./gradlew test              # unit tests, on the JVM, no emulator needed
./gradlew lint ktlintCheck  # static analysis, no warning tolerated
adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-universal-debug.apk

3. Give it a city. The map, routing and address data are not in the APK. Generating them takes one command per city:

tools/generate_all.sh --city config/cities/lille.json

It needs osmium-tool, tippecanoe and Python 3. The whole procedure, the sizes obtained and the way to add a network are in docs/offline-data.md.

The release APK weighs 7.99 MB on arm64-v8a and 7.45 MB on armeabi-v7a, map, routing, address search and journeys included, against a ceiling of 12 MB per architecture.

Dependencies

A dozen, no more, and each one is argued in docs/dependencies.md: what it does, and why it rather than another. There is no analytics, crash-reporting or advertising library under any pretext.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md, and open an issue before a large change.

• 🌍 Translate. The most useful contribution if you do not write code. Thirty languages are translated, each with its glossary in docs/glossary/; keeping one current as the English file grows is worth as much as starting a thirty-first.
• 🏙️ Add a network, or teach the address search the abbreviations of your language — one JSON file each, no code. See docs/offline-data.md.
• 🐛 Report a bug with the device, the Android version and the way to reproduce it. The application sends no log anywhere; if you attach one, read it through first. A security flaw goes to SECURITY.md rather than to a public issue.
• 💻 Write code. ./gradlew test lint ktlintCheck must pass without a single warning, business logic goes into :core with no Android import, and not a single string is hard-coded.

Read SPEC.md first: it is the project's source of truth, and it argues the decisions that look arbitrary.

To go further: the architecture, the offline data, the dependencies, the list of networks, opening a place from another application, how a release is published and signed, and the CHANGELOG.

And if none of that is for you: a ⭐ on the repository is what makes Roue Libre visible to the next person looking for a bike-share application that spies on nobody.

And to support the work itself, you can make a donation on Liberapay.

What "Roue Libre" means

Roue libre is French for freewheel: the ratchet that lets a bicycle carry on rolling while the pedals stand still. To ride en roue libre is to coast — to be carried by what you have already put in, without pushing.

The phrase is doing three things at once, and all three are the project:

• the freewheel itself, the part that makes a bike a bike;
• libre-service, French for self-service — a bike-share bike is a vélo en libre-service, which is what this application is about;
• logiciel libre, free software. Not free of charge: free as in free to use, study, change and pass on. This one is under the GPL.

One word, and it says: a bicycle, shared, and free.

Licence

GPLv3. The embedded fonts keep their own, the SIL Open Font License.

The map, the routes and the house numbers come from OpenStreetMap and, in France, from the Base Adresse Nationale, both ODbL; the availability comes from each network's own GBFS feed. The complete list of sources and their licences is in docs/offline-data.md.