We built the thing we kept wishing existed.

Every photo app on earth is very good at answering when. Almost none of them are any good at answering where — not the pin on a map, but the actual place: the doorway, the corner shop, the bench you sat on for an hour when everything was going wrong.

The rule we started with

A memory you have to travel to is worth more than one you can scroll to. That is the whole idea, and everything else in the app comes out of it. If you leave something at a place, the person you left it for has to go and stand there. We check, and we check on our side, because a lock the phone could talk its way out of is not a lock.

What we refused to build

No feed. No follower counts. No public likes. No "share to move up the waitlist". None of it is an oversight — each one was an argument somebody won, and the app is better for every single thing that is not in it.

There is no way to search for a person here. You cannot type an email address and find out whether somebody has an account, because a product that will confirm that has quietly become a tool for finding people who do not want to be found. Friends swap a short code out loud, and you can change yours whenever you like.

What we do with your location

We read it when you ask the app to check a memory, and at no other time. There is no background tracking anywhere in it. When a memory opens we record that it opened and roughly how far off you were — not where you were. There is no log of the places you have stood, because we could not think of a single thing we would honestly do with one.

Where it is going

Slowly, and on purpose. We would rather ship four things that work than twelve that nearly do. If you want to shape what comes next, the waitlist is the best place to be — we actually read the replies.

Built between Manila, Rotterdam and a great many trains