Mapoly

story card
different view types
different voices
adding a place
explore 3D
1024 x 1024 uncropped image of app icon
screenshot of app without device frames

Inspiration

It was our first time in Zürich, a beautiful city with monuments, fountains, historic buildings and interesting little details on almost every corner.

We kept asking ourselves, “What’s the story behind that?”

For famous landmarks, it’s easy to find out. For everything else, we’d have to stop walking, take out our phones, search, read, and then get back to the walk. Doing that every few minutes just wasn’t going to happen.

Then we had the idea...

What if you didn’t have to look up the city? What if the city could just tell you?

That became Mapoly, like having a friend next to you who happens to know the story behind everything around you.

We knew we were onto something, but we realised how much more it could be when we first tested it in Barcelona.

Outside Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, hundreds of people were queuing. Ten steps away was Casa Amatller, with a great story of its own, but almost nobody was looking at it.

That was when we realised Mapoly could be about much more than famous landmarks. It could help people discover the places they would normally walk straight past. And once we saw that, we started imagining what else Mapoly could become: a way for people to discover, share, and create stories about the world around them.

What it does

Mapoly turns any walk into a discovery.

Open Mapoly and the places with interesting stories around you appear on the map: monuments, historic buildings, churches, statues, hidden courtyards, and even places that look ordinary until you learn their story.

See something interesting? Tap it.

Instead of opening 10 browser tabs and becoming your own tour guide, Mapoly gives you a short, lively story you can listen to while you keep walking. Choose your language, pick the style you like, put your phone away, and explore. With Auto Mode, Mapoly can discover places for you as you walk, so you don't even have to constantly check the map.

Walking between two famous landmarks? Waiting for someone? Exploring a new neighbourhood? Mapoly helps you find the stories hiding around you.

Save places you discover, share them with friends, or suggest a place that deserves a story.

Because the best discoveries are often the ones that nobody knows about.

How we built it

We built Mapoly as a native iOS app with Swift and SwiftUI, with a TypeScript backend handling the data and everything happening behind the scenes.

The tricky part was bringing a lot of different pieces together. We combine information from multiple open-data sources to find interesting places around you, then use AI to turn that information into short engaging guides in your language and chosen tone.

We then turn those guides into audio with Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, with different voices and styles to choose from.

There is quite a lot happening behind what hopefully feels like a very simple experience: you're walking, you notice a place, and a few seconds later you're listening to its story.

Challenges we ran into

Wow, so many...!

We started without knowing any Swift, and without ever having published an app, let alone one with a map, AI, audio and in-app purchases. We learned a lot by breaking things first.

At first, we were just going to call the open-data APIs directly and keep everything as simple as possible. Then reality happened... APIs timed out, different sources returned the same place at slightly different locations, and we needed more control over what we already knew and what we had searched before. So we decided to build our own backend and basically started everything from scratch.

Then came the small matter of actually shipping the app. We had never dealt with subscriptions, webhooks, entitlements, sandbox testing or Apple's review process before. What even is a webhook? Why doesn't this purchase work? Why is Apple asking us about this? 😅

There were a few bugs that failed completely silently, so we learned that testing “it works on my phone” is definitely not enough. Getting in-app purchases working properly and getting through the App Store checklist ended up being a whole project on their own.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We shipped it!

For our first app, getting all the way from an idea on our laptops to a real app in the App Store was a big deal. We had never published an app before, and getting past that first launch was something we really wanted to prove to ourselves.

We're also really proud that Mapoly works across cities around the world from day one and supports 22 languages.

But probably our favourite accomplishment was getting to use it ourselves.

Not long after we got one of the first versions working, we happened to be in Switzerland and decided to try it while walking around. Mapoly sent us towards a hidden tower we probably would have walked straight past it otherwise.

That was the moment it stopped feeling like something we had built on our laptops and started feeling like something that could actually make people look up and notice the world around them.

What we learned

It’s OK to publish something that isn’t as perfect as it is in your mind.

That was probably the hardest lesson. You can keep polishing forever, but at some point you have to let people use it. The real product gets better when actual users tell you what works, what doesn’t, and what they wish they could do.

Before launch, we had a motto that became very famous between us whenever we came up with a new feature or idea.

“Is this absolutely necessary for the basic functionality of the app?”

It saved us from building about a hundred things we thought would be cool but would prevent us from ever publishing the app.

We also realised that the information itself isn’t the problem. There are already huge amounts of open knowledge about the places around us. The missing piece was getting the right story to someone in a short, spoken format, in their language, at exactly the moment they’re standing there.

But the biggest thing we learned came later. We don’t just want to build an app that tells people stories. We want to build a community of people who are curious about the world around them and want to share what they know too.

What's next for Mapoly

Our original vision was simple. Put your phone in your pocket and let Mapoly tell you about the world around you.

Auto Mode is the first step, but right now it mostly tells you about places as you pass them. We want Mapoly to become much more aware of your surroundings, so it can look ahead and tell you when something interesting is coming up, even if it's a couple of streets away. The idea is that you shouldn't have to look at your phone or even know what you're looking for. Mapoly should notice it for you.

We're also building the feature "Breadcrumbs", which takes the idea beyond our own guides. Anyone will be able to create a guided walk by recording their own stories at specific locations. Walk the same route later and the stories play automatically as you arrive. We think this could turn Mapoly from a guide you use into a place where people share the places and stories they care about.

From there, we'd love to build a platform for local guides, with profiles, reviews, and eventually the ability to book an in-person tour with the guide whose walk you just discovered.

We're also exploring on-device guides with Apple Intelligence, bringing free, private and offline guides to supported iPhones.

And, of course, we'll keep making the app itself simpler, more fun, and easier to use. There's a lot we want Mapoly to become. But the goal stays the same: help people notice more of the world around them.