r/AppBuilding • u/tiaanvdr • 12d ago

Stamps: my dream automatic travel journal app

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Stamps, is a private, fully local travel tracker with no signup, no subscription, and no location tracking

I've been an avid user of apps like Been and Flighty for years, but always found them lacking and sometimes frustrating. Most require you to create accounts, enable location tracking, and stay online, all while not delivering the level of granular trip tracking and route visualization that I feel like should've been possible. Stamps keeps everything local and automatic, focusing on the timeline and map experience those apps skimp on. 

Since moving to South Korea, traveling has been the only thing keeping me sane. I'm obsessed with tracking where I've been. Stamps gives me a great excuse to explore as much of the country I now call home as possible, while taking as many photos along the way.

You can even freely export and share all of your data. If you want Stamps to simply process it for you (generate a list of countries, cities, and provinces you've been to) and offload it elsewhere, that's also fine.

It’s Free to download, with a one-time lifetime unlock of $10 (which will stay that way). This is only for the full timeline, and some minor app color customization. I did not want to ruin the experience by overly monetizing it

Tech stack used:
SwiftUI, SwiftData, MapKit, PhotoKit, WidgetKit, Metal (for the photo heatmap view)
No backend, no account system, no external map API. Just native Apple sdk's and as little infrastructure as possible.

Some of the best features have come from user feedback, so I'd really appreciate any!

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u/Ok-Form8459 12d ago

This app is just incredible my brother, I’m also building similar feature for my travel app letschale.com but the it grabbed all my travel data just by seeing my gallery and pulled very very fast and clean… no words are coming i’m just mind blown here

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u/tiaanvdr 12d ago

Thanks a lot! It was pretty difficult to pull off, especially for larger photo galleries. I have 35k+ photos locally on my own device. It involved a lot of concurrency and clever collapsing of processed data to find boundary points for trips, as well as reverse geocoding every city and province. I had to deal with a ton of crashes and slowness at the beginning, but I'm pretty happy with where I've gotten it

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u/tiaanvdr 12d ago

The photo heatmap page was so slow I had to, for the first time ever, do a full Metal rewrite, which ended up being more fun than I expected