Journie: AI Trip Planner & Map

Plan trips with Jo, a private on-device AI planner. 800+ destinations, day-by-day timelines on a map, shared trips with buddies, budgets, and a passport stamp for every country you visit.

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Inspiration

Every trip I've planned has looked the same: a map app, a notes app, forty screenshots, a spreadsheet for money and a group chat where decisions go to die. I wanted one place that holds the whole journey, from "where should we go?" to "where have I been?", and that feels as good as the trip itself. That's Journie.

What it does

Discover. A feed of 800+ destinations, 26,000 places and 2,000 ready-made itineraries, with "when to go" guidance and photos that make you want to book.

Plan with Jo. Jo is Journie's AI travel planner. Tell Jo what you love, answer a few quick questions, and save a day-by-day plan in one tap. Jo runs privately on your iPhone with Apple's on-device model, and Cloud AI is there for deeper plans.

Organise every day. Each day lives on a timeline and a map, with stops, routes, travel times, bookings, tickets and photos. On iPad it becomes a full three-pane planning workspace.

Plan together. Invite travel buddies to a shared trip, vote on places, split costs and settle up, all synced privately through iCloud. People you invite join free.

The trip toolkit. Budgets with multi-currency expenses, checklists, attachments for tickets and bookings, and Apple Weather forecasts for every destination.

Your passport. When you get home, every country becomes a stamp in your passport (or a pin on a globe), with stats for everywhere you've been.

How I built it

  • SwiftUI on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, designed around Liquid Glass and native navigation, with SwiftData for local storage.
  • Foundation Models power Jo on-device: guided generation turns a conversation into a structured, day-by-day plan. A cloud model on a small TypeScript backend on AWS handles bigger requests.
  • CloudKit with CKSyncEngine: every shared trip gets its own zone and a zone-wide share, so buddies' edits sync through iCloud.
  • MapKit for maps, routes and travel times, WeatherKit for forecasts, and Image Playground for AI cover art.
  • RevenueCat for subscriptions. The paywall is native SwiftUI, but tier names, AI credits and trip limits come from the RevenueCat offering's metadata, so I can retune the tiers without shipping an update.
  • Motion is built from a small set of shared tokens: native zoom transitions between cards and pages, staggered entrance cascades and particle effects on likes.

Challenges I ran into

  • Making on-device AI dependable. Small models drift. I ended up with a guided flow where a deterministic client steers the conversation and the model only extracts structure from free text, which made plans far more consistent.
  • Sharing without a server of record. Getting CloudKit shared zones, invites and offline edits to behave took a lot of iteration.
  • iPad as a first-class app, not a stretched phone: split panes, reorderable lists and a map workspace, without breaking the native toolbar and tab bar.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • A complete travel app, discovery to memories, built by one person.
  • An AI planner that runs privately on your own device.
  • Details I care about: boarding-pass trip cards, passport stamps and a paywall I can tune from the RevenueCat dashboard.

What I learned

The best AI features feel like part of the app, not a chat box bolted on. Design constraints (system toolbars only, concentric corners everywhere, one motion vocabulary) made the app faster to build and more coherent. And pricing is a product decision: keeping privacy controls free for everyone and letting invitees join free made the paid tiers easier to explain.

What's next for Journie

Following buddies and seeing their shared itineraries in Explore and Passport, trip invites by email and Google sign-in. Then growing the destination catalogue and listening hard to the first users.

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