Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

One of the best things that I did was spending a week making a simple app that can put all my Apple Watch walks on a single big map, then sharing it with my friends after it got published on AppStore. It's been a year since I worked on it, but I still get messages from my friends (and some random people who found it!) how they've walked through an entire city or something. Really rewarding experience, despite having zero financial gains from it.

OP is right, making simple apps for your friends for fun!

This sounds great, could you link the app please?

Not the OPs app but there's an app doing something similar that I enjoyed for many years, you can also import from GPS trackers and others: https://fogofworld.app

Not OP, but https://dawarich.app/ seems to do the same (open source and self-hostable, also has an iOS App).

Just think about the thousands of useless obstacles and moats you’ve had to navigate and overcome to make that. How many millions have given up at any one of them.

After all that you still control nothing and are vendor locked.

Imagine if you could just AI prompt that up and simply transfer to your open source watches.

What a world that would be.

Here you go — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mapcut/id6478268682. It’s really not supposed to be super nice, but good enough to have some active users. It’s free, so have fun! Sorry for putting it behind auth gates, I was experimenting with some other features that required webservers running.

Help build the world you want to see! It will take folks passionately trying to make this open, free, unmonetized vision a reality in competition with the walled gardens you're decrying. I wish you luck if you give it a go!

Does that work like a game map where the fog disappears where you have been? That would be cool, although the reviews aren't great.

I use https://wandrer.earth/ , connected to Strava

Yea that’s the idea. Worked well for the years where I tried it.

Fair point, but as I grew up, I realized those things really don’t matter to me. My thought process was — oh, I walk around a lot, I’m curious how much of the city I’ve covered -> oh, there’s no free app for that -> oh, I’ve never made an iOS app and this looks simple -> let’s spend a week making it and share it with friends.

As a side note, as I grew up, I realized I genuinely don’t care about the walled garden flame wars, and things alike. Life is pretty simple, I’d rather walked around a new neighbourhood and grab a pint.

Wow I’ve had this idea in my pocket for a long time, thanks for making it real!