Our Story
Two fishermen. One problem. Four rewrites. Zero quit.
The Problem
Every fishing app we tried did the same thing: show us a weather forecast and call it a fishing forecast. Pressure is 30.12. Wind is 10 mph. Moon is waxing. Great — now what?
None of them knew that David catches walleye when pressure drops below 30.0 and water is 58-65°F. None of them knew that Nick's best smallmouth days happen when flow is 350-500 CFS and it's two hours after sunrise. None of them could tell us when to go fishing based on how we actually fish.
So we built one that could.
The People
David Yutzy
Lifelong angler. 45+ years in IT & software development. Lake Erie walleye addict.
Based in the Huron & Sandusky, Ohio area, David has fished his entire life — rivers, lakes, ocean, but the Great Lakes are home. He brings over 45 years of IT and development experience to the Hooked on Yutz app portfolio. Every line of Get Hooked! — from the 12-factor forecast engine to the drift physics calculator to the River Explorer — comes from decades on the water and decades behind a keyboard. He's the one who noticed that his best walleye days had a pattern, got frustrated that no app could see it, and decided to build one that could.
Captain Nick Cook
25+ years on Lake Erie. Charter captain. The voice of "would an actual fisherman use this?"
Nick runs Vitamin Sea Fishing Charters & Excursions out of Sandusky, Ohio — spring out of Lakeside/Marblehead, summers in Sandusky Bay, fall out of Huron. Over 25 years on the water with his 27-foot Tiara Sunny Diane means he's the reality check. If a feature survives Nick's field testing on paying charter clients, it's real. If it doesn't, it gets cut — no matter how cool it looked in development. Captain Mode was literally built for his business first.
The Journey
Get Hooked! didn't spring into existence fully formed. It was built, broken, rebuilt, nearly killed, and rebuilt again. Four times.
October 2025 — The First Version
Native iOS app. Built in four weeks. Submitted to the App Store, dealt with rejections, got through. It had waypoints, weather, heat maps, and the bones of what the app would become. But it only worked on iPhone, and we wanted to reach everyone.
December 2025 — The Cross-Platform Attempt
We rewrote everything in Kotlin Multiplatform to ship on both iPhone and Android from one codebase. Built the entire foundation in a single day. Submitted to both app stores by day eleven. It worked — until it didn't.
Google Play rejected the app because a fishing app "shouldn't need access to your photos." They didn't understand that scanning your camera roll for fish photos IS the feature — it imports years of catch history in minutes. We rewrote it, hid the feature on Android, and submitted again.
Meanwhile, Android had zero paying customers. Not one.
February 2026 — The Split
The shared codebase was holding both platforms back. Google Play drew a clear line on what features they'd approve — Photo Scan, camera roll access, certain permissions — and that line meant Android couldn't have everything we wanted to build. Instead of limiting the iOS experience to match Android's restrictions, we split them apart.
Android stays on the KMP codebase and continues shipping on Google Play. iOS got a ground-up rewrite in pure Swift — free to push as far as Apple will let us.
February – March 2026 — The Sprint
35 days. From first commit to feature-complete. Every lesson from the previous three versions informed the architecture — strict code discipline, no shortcuts, no "we'll fix it later." The app shipped with 63+ features, 12 map layers, 568,000 points of interest, 24 live data integrations, and an Apple Watch companion.
Not because we rushed. Because we'd already made every mistake once before.
Why This Matters
We didn't build Get Hooked! to compete with Fishbrain's 15 million users or Navionics' nautical charts. We built it because we wanted an app that knows how we fish and tells us when to go.
The big fishing apps show you data and call it a day. They show everyone the same forecast. They don't know your spots, your patterns, your species, your conditions. They can't tell you that tomorrow at Elk Creek looks like your best five walleye days combined.
Get Hooked! can. Because it learns from YOU — not from a million strangers on a social feed. Your catches, your conditions, your patterns, your intelligence. The app gets smarter every time you fish, and that intelligence belongs to you. No account required. No data shared. Export everything.
We're fishermen who happen to write code. The fishing knowledge came first. The app came second.
What's Next
The current app is the foundation. Every catch you log, every forecast graded, every pattern discovered — it's all building toward something much bigger.
We can't say much yet. But what we're working on will fundamentally change how you interact with your fishing data. The intelligence systems in the app today? They're the groundwork.
Every catch you log today makes tomorrow's experience dramatically better. Stay tuned.
Join us on the water.
$29.99/year. Every feature. No limits. No nonsense.
© 2026 Hooked on Yutz. Get Hooked! is a trademark of Hooked on Yutz.