January 2025—Having released the Explore Cities! app recently, I keep coming back to a radically different approach. What if I remove the map from my maps app?
Instead of overloading you with options of places to go to and giving you exact directions to each, what if the app only showed you spots nearby? Wouldn’t that make people actually go outside and explore more?
So augmenting the idea of a Lindy Walk (exploring without a set destination and following your curiosity), with data of which directions are promising to head towards.
And a way to see information about places you stand in front of, once you’re there. A personal tourguide, where you decide where to go spontaneously.
February 2025—So I started working on this, writing the app in SwiftUI which I don’t really know, with the help of Cursor. I treat it as the AI’s project: it writes the code and creates historical stories based on Wikipedia.
I’m there to make the designs and tweak it until it feel right. A lot of fun.
The first version has 3 components: a “radar” view of nearby places to explore, “quests” to check out specific neighbourhoods, and yes, again, a 3D map (I could not resist).
March 2025—I joined the On Deck fellowship program in SF for a few weeks, which was just so cool.
It seems that the best way to describe my app, which resonates the most with people, is “Pokemon Go for travel”.
April 2025—The last weeks I focused on creating TikTok content to get people to pre-order the app. It’s been relatively successful!
I never liked marketing but this feels different. I see it as building a pipeline to generate content, of which some take off. Much less pressure than putting everything into one video idea.
May 2025—The app is now live in the App Store! And people are using it!!!
As tutorial I wrote a virtual character “Lindy” who tasks you with uncovering secrets for her research. Quite a weird idea for a travel app, but it seems to work!
This is so cool. Am busy fixing bugs now.
July 2025—I improved the content pipeline for the app (how it creates “secrets” from geolocated Wikipedia articles). There’s now an chat where you can ask follow-up questions.
And I added more cities to the app, which unfortunately is quite a time-consuming process. Mostly to find photo archives where I can scrape 1000s of photos from, find high quality neighbourhood polygon data, and to debug the content pipeline.
September 2025—I feel a bit burned out by the project, having recently released a new “quests” features which doesn’t see much usage.
People are still buying the app regardless, so actually what is there for me to do?
Focusing on other projects for a bit, namely MAPSGAME.
June 2026—Now that it’s summer again I have a lot of new energy to improve the app.
Need to address a few key problems: it takes too long to see what a place is about, the quests not that interesting, and coordinates are sometimes wrong.
I have ideas for all of those, and already shipped an update with small UX fixes. So fun!!
August 2026—Ok I bundled together sooo many updates that it’s worthy of a 2.0!
The previous “chat” interface has been replaced by a simple postcard to collect, Quests are completely redone, more cities added, and even more UX fixes.
But the biggest change I stumbled upon randomly while searching for way to make the app usable from home: YOU CAN NOW EXPLORE VIRTUALLY!!!
This works using Apple Maps Look Around, with custom UI overlayed. I haven’t ever seen this done before, but it works so well. Like Street View, but smoother, and with a purpose.
September 2026—I spent a lot of time making the Quests in the app more video-gamy, and landed on a simple but fun result!
Stories you collect IRL or virtually have up to 3 tags attached. And a Quest requires you to collect 5 stoties of the same tag, to unlock a narrative “conclusion”.
Which reveals a cool story of how the places you’ve found fit the bigger picture 🕵♀️
For instance in Rotterdam, the “Modernist” quest leads to how the city today was not just a product of rebuilding after the war, but a deliberate revolution by a younger generation of city planners 👀
BUT the trick is: you have to choose which quests to level up, because collected secrets can only be used once!
October 2026—Another update turning the app more into a classic video game: this time the 3D map! It’s now covered by a fog-of-war you have to reveal one neighbourhood at a time 😶🌫
Besides being way more fun and less overwhelming, this shows you where you’ve been, and helps you plan where to go next!
For this I changed how the virtual explore works: there are now a series of “Fast-Travel-Points” scattered across the city you can teleport to.
Well, not “scattered” exactly, because they are based on real-world metro stops. Which, IRL or virtually, are really the best starting points to explore a city!
