Washington State offers anglers some of the most diverse fishing opportunities available anywhere in the world. In a single weekend, you can dig for clams, troll for salmon, drop a pot for Dungeness crab, fly fish for steelhead, trout or bass, jig for halibut or rockfish, and bait fish for catfish, tuna, lingcod or sturgeon. Maintaining this wide range of fishing opportunities necessitates correspondingly diverse—and sometimes complex—fishing regulations. Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) publishes an annual sport fishing rules pamphlet that is over 130 pages long and almost half an inch thick. Anglers frequently complain about how difficult the pamphlet is to use. In late 2015, the agency launched a project to build Android and iOS fishing regulations apps for Washington’s nearly 1,000,000 licensed anglers. We will discuss how we built the offline-capable mobile apps with ArcGIS Quartz Runtime SDKs and how we are leveraging AWS and ArcGIS Server to support fishing regulations management, real-time push notifications, and geodatabase replication for syncing via delta and full-replace methods on the mobile apps.
