Press Kit – Control

About Control Orienteering Analysis

Control is a mobile application that enables the analysis of orienteering performance directly on a smartphone. With the app, you can take a picture of the map, overlay it with the GPS route imported from sports watch or Apple Watch, and analyze the orienteering easily after the run. Control app provides an easy mobile interface for post race analysis and is a digital map archive that orienteerers have always with them in their smartphone.

The app also allows comparing routes with a friend or drawing and measuring alternative route choices. With Control app, performance analysis is available after any training session or competition, regardless of the services provided by the event organizer.

The app is available for iPhone, Android, iPad, and Mac. Control is free to download and use. Advanced features require a Total Control subscription, available on a yearly or monthly basis. The yearly subscription includes a 14-day free trial for new users. The app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Orienteering is a family sport, hence Control supports Apple’s Family Sharing, same subscription can be shared between family members.

In August 2024 a new feature, Control Club, will be released. It allows users to share runs to their friends and team mates inside the app. Users can follow their friends and top runners and will see their latest courses easily. Previously Control app has allowed users to share the route as a picture or create video. With Control Club, sharing of course executions is made much easier and followers can react to the runs. Control Club is in public beta in 2024 from June to August.

Story of Control app

Control app’s developer Petri Tilli is a passionate amateur orienteer since 1998 and runs in his hometown club Ylämaan Pyrkijät. Petri has worked as a software developer, mainly for Apple iOS and noticed there was no good orienteering post race analysis tools for Apple devices (Mac or iOS), or for smartphones in general.

“I started playing with this idea, how could I by myself develop an analysis software for Mac. And then it started dawning to me that I don’t really want to do it for the Mac but for iPhone. Because the mobile phone is the personal computer that you have with you everywhere and it has a camera you can use to scan the map. Also, I had worked in multiple iOS app projects already for several years so I would know how to build this thing. Also, Apple introduced the Apple Watch which I started picturing as the perfect orienteering companion watch -especially once they added GPS to it in the 2nd generation.“

It took some time to develop the idea, but during summer 2016 Petri started to develop the Apple Watch app for tracking the run and iPhone app as orienteering analysis tool. The first version of Control app and the watch app were released in Spring 2018. New features has been introduced to Control over the years steadily and the feature set has grown as well as supported hardware. Support for Apple iPad was introduced in 2019 and a Mac version was released in 2022. Petri asked his friend who is an Android developer to help build the first version for Android devices. This version was released in spring 2021. Petri has then continued to develop the Android version and adding more features to it to make it closer to the iOS version. Android version is still a bit behind the iOS counterpart but catching up.

Petri also got help from his clubmates. During 2020 Petri’s childhood friend and team mate from Ylämaan Pyrkijät asked if he could help a bit on backend development as Control did not support importing tracks from Suunto devices. Petri had developed integration for Garmin devices already winter 2019-2020, but there was no support for Suunto or Polar. His friend developed in 2021 integration to Suunto and support for Polar followed later in 2022.

Feature set in Control has grown steadily as a hobby project. So has the user base. Control had in May 2024 more than 3000 monthly active users, and the user base doubles every year. Control is mostly used in Finland still, but it is widely adopted around the orienteering world. Petri’s dream is that maybe Control could be more than a hobby and in the beginning of 2023 company called Orienteers Oy, was founded to handle Control app’s development. Petri is the sole employee of the company and the app has not yet yet grown to the scale it could be a full time job but he has taken first steps to do so:

“For a long time, I wanted to bring a social aspect to Control. After a race you discuss the route choices, mistakes and execution with your friends. In my club, we always went through the control point interval comparison with team mates after the race. I wanted to have something similar in Control. You could send images or videos via email, messaging or share to social media, but the app itself was not social. My idea was that you could see all your friends, competitors and top athletes runs in the app. Think Strava but solely focused for orienteering.”

With the newly established company Petri got some funding, and during the first half of 2024, he developed Control Club. It allows users to follow other users and share their runs to their followers. Control Club entered Public Beta in June 2024 and will be made available for all users in August 2024. This is only the first stage of Control Club and Petri has many plans for developing it further:

“I’m really exited about launching the first version. With some help, I managed to get some top elite runners to test the app and give me feedback during the Beta testing. I have already plans what features I want to add, the product is far from ready, but also I’m interested to learn what world’s top runners think about the app and Control Club. I’m planning to add features like commenting, comparing your run with other runner on same course, improving the route choice analysis and many other things. I hope Control Club accelerates the use of the app and Control will become an app every orienteer has on their phone.”

Description of the Application

A typical user journey for analysing the route consists of following stages:

User tracks the orienteering run either with Control app running on mobile phone, with Control app on Apple Watch or with any other sportswatch, such as Garmin, Polar or Suunto.
GPS route syncronises automatically from Apple Watch to Control app. Route saved with Control app is also immediately available after the run on the app. Users using other sports watches import the run from their service. This can be done directly from Control app by authorizing access to data stored to sportwatch makers cloud services.
User imports a picture of the map to Control. User can scan the paper map with camera, import a picture or a PDF document.
User calibrates the run to the map. This is done by selecting a point on the route and moving it to matching point on the map. Typically you need to add only few points to calibrate the route on the map.
User can place control point locations to the map, so that app can calculate e.g. how much extra distance runner covered.
Run is ready for analysis.
Users can share the run with a public description to followers. Followers see the run in their Control Club feed.
Users can react to runs posted by other users

Control app has the following features *:

Analysis features:
- Analyse different route choices and measure their distances and estimated time differences
- Import friends route and compare routes and speed
- Playback the course with Replay
- Mark control points and edit their locations
- Write notes, save link to results
- Configure speed zones and compare used time and travelled distance per zone
- View either satellite image or orienteering map
Sharing features:
- Create and share video of worst mistakes and best achievements
- Share track & map image to Digital Orienteering Map Arvhice (DOMA)
- Share track directly to Livelox and connect to Livelox event and class.
- Share track image
- Share GPX track
- Connect with Garmin Connect, Suunto or Polar account for faster imports
Map archive / collection features:
- Search maps by name
- Tag maps and filter maps by tags
- See location of each orienteering run on a world map
- Sync courses with iCloud across iOS devices
- Sync courses with Control Cloud across Android devices

* Feature set between iOS and Android differ and some features are not yet implemented on Android

Supported Platforms:

Control works on iOS 15.0 and newer operating systems. Supported iPhone models are iPhone 6s and newer.
Control for Apple Watch works on watchOS 8.0 and newer operating systems. For best experience we recommend having a Series 4 or newer.
Control for Android works on Android version 10 and newer.
Control for Mac works on Mac OS 12 Monterey and newer.

Customer Reviews

This was exactly the app I was looking for years. As a Mac user I couldn’t use quickroute and this baby does the job even better. Everything can be done within the app take the photo from the map import easily the gpx track. What can I say more apart it’s brilliant!

This is just what I have been looking for. Efficient, uncluttered face on the Apple Watch, no unnecessary buttons to confuse while on the course. Flips to a no-buttons face while moving to avoid inadvertent Stop or Mark. Ingest the map using the iPhone camera; don’t have to find a scanner. Register the route with the map just like in Quick Route. Can transmit the route-on-map image using the usual iPhone “share” methods. Includes your marked Control points in the GPX file.

Easy-to-use and handy orienteering analysis software. Calibrating the map is an oddly satisfying experience. If nothing else, it’s worth going into the woods just to get some new material to scrutinize in Control.

The new feature where you can create video clips of the route is awesome! It takes some time to compress the video of the entire route, but you can quickly get the best parts playing on the screen. Orienteering is the best, and with this app, post-analysis is even better!

Outstanding in its class. Super fast to check mistakes right after the run, even just with a photo of the map taken with the camera. Routes from Garmin are 100% reliable. Awesome!