Stray

My first iOS app just released to the App Store!

It’s a fog-of-war style exploration app called Stray that tracks your movement and lets you find out where you have and haven’t been. Whenever you walk into a new 50x50 meter GPS area, it unlocks that tile, and as you use it you can watch your map grow to reflect the spatiality of your life and routine, like a map with memory!

It also lets you see where you go most frequently using a gradient mode, and replay the route you took on any given day, plus it can scan your camera roll and add all your photos onto your map exactly where they were taken!

I built it because I wanted an app like it, but all the others that were similar weren’t free, or had too much gamification, ads, leaderboards, etc. I wanted something simple and streamlined, and now it exists and anyone can download it.

I was particularly inspired by the French avant-garde art movement Situationist International. These guys loved something called dérive, which means “to drift” and refers to the idea of just kind of letting yourself explore your urban environment without direction or expectations.

Developing Stray was an awesome experience and taught me a ton about what I value in both the process and the outcome of product development. I am more convinced now than ever that this is the greatest time in history to be an ideas person!

Even though I made a lot of mistakes in my workflow, and wasted hours tuning minute design changes that my testers didn’t even end up noticing, the feeling I got when I installed the beta on my friend’s phone and watched him light up as he retraced his memories spatially using the photo mode was the most gratifying one I have ever gotten from working on software.

I’m currently taking everything I learned and pouring it into my new project, and it’s the biggest, weirdest, toughest thing I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on. More on that soon.

Check it out if you’re interested, and let me know if you find bugs. ;p