Saying out loud what I'm working on keeps me honest. It also means that if something here sounds useful — or sounds wrong — you can tell me while it's still easy to change. Nothing below is released yet. It's all running on my own phone and Mac right now, and I'm testing it with my own notes.

The problem: your phone fills up

GeoJSONic keeps everything on your phone. That's the point — no account, no server, no cloud copy you didn't ask for. But photos and videos add up. My own journal is a couple hundred notes and about 3 GB of media, and my single biggest note — a weekend trip with 48 photos and videos — takes up 648 MB by itself.

At some point you want the old stuff somewhere else. The usual answer is "put it in the cloud." I don't want to give that answer.

Archive to Mac

The next GeoJSONic can send older notes straight to your Mac over your own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth — the same phone-to-phone connection nearby sharing already uses, no internet required.

It works like this:

1. Your Mac shows a code.
2. You point your iPhone's camera at it.
3. GeoJSONic shows exactly what it's about to send — say, every note older than six months — and you tap Send.
4. Your Mac checks every single file that arrived: every photo, every video, every recording, every route.
5. Only then does your phone offer to delete those notes to free up space. And only the ones the Mac confirmed.

That last step is the one I care about most. Deleting from your phone happens after the copy is verified, and only if you tap the button. If anything didn't arrive intact, the phone says so and keeps everything.

The first time I ran it for real, it moved two old notes off my phone, verified them, and cleaned them up. Small, but it worked the way it should.

Look before you move anything

Moving things is easier when you can see them first. So there's a second option: your Mac can ask your phone for a summary — each note's title, date, place, tags, how many photos and videos it has, and how much space it takes up. Not the note text, and not the photos themselves. Just enough to decide.

From there you can see which notes are eating your storage, sort them by age, and even look at them all on a globe on your Mac. Then you pick what to back up — "everything from that trip," "anything with video older than three months" — and your phone asks you to confirm before sending.

PortaDrive becomes the home for your archive

PortaDrive already opens a PDF like a USB drive so you can browse the files inside it in Finder. Every GeoJSONic backup is one of those PDFs — a readable document with your notes, as open GeoJSON, and your original photos and videos tucked inside.

The next PortaDrive grows a library: a folder on your Mac that holds every archive you've sent over, checks that none of them have been damaged, and lets you find any note again. Open any archive in PortaDrive and your photos are right there in Finder. No proprietary format — if GeoJSONic and PortaDrive disappeared tomorrow, your files would still be ordinary PDFs, photos, and GeoJSON.

You can just ask

Here's the part I'm most excited about. The first version of the Mac side is a command-line tool. That sounds nerdy — but it means an AI assistant like Claude can run it for you.

So instead of learning where the buttons are, you can type something like "move everything older than six months off my phone," scan the code that appears, and let it handle the rest. Or ask "what's using the most space on my phone?" and get an answer. You stay in control — nothing leaves your phone until you tap Send, and nothing is deleted until you tap Delete — but you don't have to do the busywork.

Smaller things coming to GeoJSONic

• Merge notes. Select a few notes and merge them into one. The note you pick keeps its title and place; the others become entries in its journal, each keeping its own time, text, and pin on the map. All the photos, videos, and routes come along.
• Richer places. Tap a store or restaurant on the map and you'll see its phone number (tap to call), website, and hours — "open now" at a glance.
• Reviews & photos. One tap opens Apple's place card for ratings, reviews, and photos, right on top of the map.
• Share a place with anyone. Share sends a simple link. If your friend has GeoJSONic, it opens right on that spot. If they don't, it opens a page with a map and directions in Apple Maps or Google Maps — here's what that looks like. No app required, no account, and the place lives entirely in the link.

What isn't changing

No account. No server holding your journal. No cloud copy. Your notes stay on your devices, in formats you can open without me. Everything above is built around that, not in spite of it.

I'll write again when these ship. In the meantime, if you want to tell me what you'd do with them — or what worries you — I read everything: jason@geojsonic.com.

Millions of apps exist in it, but if you open the App Store and start browsing, you don't really see the App Store. You see the part Apple has chosen to put in front of you: featured apps, charts, collections, recommendations, and apps that are already getting attention.

I started wondering about everything underneath that.

What if I just wanted to see the apps that were released today?

Not the best apps released this week. Not "New and Noteworthy." Not the apps that already have thousands of downloads.

I wanted to see the apps nobody is looking at yet.

The brand-new weather app made by one person.

The oddly specific utility somebody built because they needed it themselves.

The first game from a developer nobody has heard of.

The app with zero ratings, zero reviews, and perhaps only a handful of people on Earth who even know it exists.

Basically, I wanted the raw feed.

Turns out, you can actually do this

I found a site called AppAgg, short for Application Aggregator.

They maintain a chronological list of recently released iOS apps, including apps that would probably never appear anywhere prominent inside Apple's own App Store.

You can browse the newest iOS apps here:

Browse newly released iOS apps on AppAgg

And this is where it gets funny.

While browsing around, I searched for GeoJSONic.

There it was.

My app was sitting in exactly the obscure corner of the App Store I had gone looking for.

GeoJSONic on AppAgg

And I kind of loved that.

The App Store has an invisible layer

When you build an app, you spend months — sometimes years — thinking about it.

You design it. You rewrite things. You test it. You obsess over tiny details nobody else will ever notice.

Then eventually you press the button and release it into a store containing millions of other apps.

And unless Apple features you, you already have an audience, or your launch happens to catch on, your app simply becomes one more tiny object floating around in that enormous database.

That's true for GeoJSONic, too.

GeoJSONic is an offline location journal built around open GeoJSON. You can save places, record routes, map areas, attach photos, voice recordings and notes, and keep the resulting geographic data on your own device instead of having to create an account and store everything on somebody else's server.

I've spent an absurd amount of time building it.

But from the perspective of the App Store, it started exactly where nearly every independent app starts: at zero. Zero downloads. Zero ratings. Zero people searching for its name.

And somewhere every day there are developers pressing that same Release button for the first time.

That's the part of the App Store I find fascinating.

One thing I didn't expect when I found GeoJSONic there: AppAgg already rates it Gold, with a score of 7,950 — a tier above Bronze and Silver, recalculated daily from popularity, ratings, freshness, and community signals. It's fresh enough that it's already picked up the update I shipped a few hours before I wrote this. For a first App Store app a couple of months in, I'll admit I'm proud of that. There's a long way to go, but it's a nice sign.

These are somebody's projects

Scroll through the new-app feed long enough and you'll find plenty of things that look strange, unfinished, extremely niche, or just completely unlike anything a large company would ever build.

That's what makes it interesting.

Behind many of those listings is probably one developer who spent six months working after their day job.

Or somebody learning Swift who finally shipped their first app.

Or a person who needed a tool for an incredibly specific problem and decided other people might need it too.

Some of those apps will disappear. Some will probably never get more than a few downloads. Some may quietly develop a small group of users who absolutely love them. And one of them might eventually become an app everybody knows.

You can't tell yet. You're seeing them at the beginning.

It's almost like wandering through a flea market for software

The modern internet increasingly funnels us toward things that have already won.

Popular videos get recommended because they're popular. Popular posts get shown because people are engaging with them. Popular apps rank because people are already downloading them.

That system is useful, but it means discovery becomes circular. We mostly see what everybody else is already seeing.

Browsing apps chronologically breaks that loop. There's no popularity filter. No requirement that anybody else thinks something is interesting first.

It's just: here's what somebody released.

And I find that strangely refreshing.

Scroll down my own AppAgg listing and there's the proof of it: a sidebar of "Similar" apps I'd never heard of — Geo Tracker, Geo Measure Area Calculator, Geo Timestamp, Geo Changer, a whole aisle of navigation apps built by people I've never met, sitting in the exact same Bronze-through-Legend tier ladder as mine. That's the flea market, right there, on my own page.

Go look at the weird stuff

If you're an iPhone user, an app developer, or just somebody who enjoys discovering obscure software, spend a few minutes looking through the newest releases sometime.

Ignore the rankings. Click something because the icon looks strange. Try an app with no reviews. Look at what independent developers are experimenting with.

You might find something great. You might find something terrible. You might find something that makes you wonder how it possibly got approved.

But you'll be seeing a side of the App Store that most people never see. And somewhere in there, you'll find GeoJSONic too.

That feels like exactly where an indie app should start.

Download GeoJSONic on the App Store →

— Jason Dittmer Creator of GeoJSONic

Turn-by-turn navigation, built in

The biggest thing in 1.3: GeoJSONic Pro can now navigate you turn-by-turn, right in the app. Get directions to a place, a saved note, or a stop on a trip, and GeoJSONic guides you there — voice prompts, live rerouting, the works. You don't have to hand off to another app to actually get where you're going anymore.

Or just ride along and look around

Not every route needs turn-by-turn — sometimes you just want to see it. Pro also adds virtual rides: pick a saved route and GeoJSONic flies you along it, with a slower Sightseeing mode for taking in the view. Controls stay tucked away by default — just a small play/pause button — and you can pan, zoom, and look around while the ride keeps going.

A map that stays the way you left it

Your chosen map style — Standard, Satellite, or the dark night look — now stays consistent everywhere in the app instead of resetting screen to screen. Hold three fingers on the capture map or the globe to switch between Satellite and Auto on the spot (Satellite is a Pro feature).

Richer places, easier to work with

Tap into a place and you'll see more detail than before, plus a one-tap way to copy its coordinates. And on the globe, you can now press and hold a saved note to open it straight from its own menu — no more hunting through a list to get back to something you dropped a pin on.

Still an offline social network first

It's easy to lose this in a list of new features, so I want to say it plainly: GeoJSONic shares nothing to a server, ever. When you hand a note to a friend, it goes phone to phone — hold two phones together, or scan a QR code, and the file crosses over directly. No account, no upload, no middleman. That's not a missing feature, it's the whole idea. Nearby sharing got more reliable this cycle, especially for notes with a lot of photos and video attached.

Under the hood

A batch of fixes rounds out the release: smoother recording controls, navigation reliability improvements, better large-text layouts for anyone using bigger system text sizes, and stronger protection for your saved notes and attachments.

Thanks for coming along

If you've been using GeoJSONic while I've been building this — thank you. Every note about what's working, what's confusing, or what you wish it did shapes what I build next. If you haven't tried it yet, download GeoJSONic on the App Store.

— Jason Dittmer Creator of GeoJSONic

There have been 107 first-time downloads through September 4. That might sound small by App Store standards, but when you're building something yourself, seeing it reach people around the world feels pretty incredible.

About 68% of those downloads came from outside the United States. People have discovered GeoJSONic in Türkiye, China, Mexico, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya, Chile, and more. Just this week, Tanzania, Indonesia, Poland, and the Philippines joined the list.

For an app about geography and travel, I couldn't ask for a more meaningful beginning.

Your travels are more than a line on a map

I'm building GeoJSONic around a simple idea: the places you go deserve more than a pin.

A trip is the route you took, the photos you captured, the unexpected stop, and the story you don't want to forget. GeoJSONic brings those pieces together on a 3D globe, with trip planning, places, photos, voice-recorded memories, and geographic journaling.

I want it to be a way to explore the world—and tell your own story within it.

Next up: version 1.3

I'm working on GeoJSONic 1.3 now, and I'm excited to share more as it comes together.

There's something motivating about knowing this isn't just an app on my own phone anymore. People in places I've never visited are downloading something I made. That makes me want to keep improving it—and hear what would make it more useful for your adventures.

If you've tried GeoJSONic, thank you. I'd love to know where you're using it, what you enjoy, and what you'd like to see next.

And if you haven't tried it yet, download GeoJSONic on the App Store.

More on version 1.3 soon.

— Jason Dittmer
Creator of GeoJSONic

The old answer was a .geojson file. Perfect for you — it's the real data, lossless, standard. Useless for your mom. She opens it and sees a wall of coordinates.

I could have made a "pretty" export that throws the data away, and a "real" export that throws the pretty away, and made you choose. Instead I asked a better question: what if it didn't have to be a choice?

One file, two layers

When you share a note, you get a PDF. Just a PDF — the most universal document there is. Your mom opens it on any phone, any computer, and sees a clean field report: a map with your route or your pins drawn on it, your photos, your words, the date and place. She reads it like a page. She doesn't need to know what GeoJSON is, or that your app exists.

But tucked inside that same PDF is the whole note — the original .geojson, byte-for-byte, plus every original photo, video, and voice memo, embedded as real file attachments. When someone with GeoJSONic opens that PDF, the app pulls the note back out, perfectly, and drops it into their journal. Nothing lost. Same coordinates, same media, same everything.

The document your mom reads and the data your app imports are the same file. You never choose between beautiful and lossless — you get both.

This isn't a hack. Embedding files inside a PDF is part of the standard (it's how archival PDF/A-3 works). I spent a full day proving the round-trip before I wrote a line of the feature: share a note, extract the embedded data with a completely separate tool, and confirm it came out identical to the original down to the last byte. It did.

It scales to your whole journal

Because the data streams into the file instead of loading all at once, this works for a single note and for a full backup that's gigabytes of video. Your entire journal becomes one self-describing PDF: a cover page with the stats, and every note and clip embedded inside, ready to restore. One file that is your life on a map — readable by anyone, owned by you.

Free to share, richer with Pro

There are two flavors, and both draw their map on Mapbox now. A free share is the slim version — your note, the route or pins drawn in, your photos, a one-line summary. The richer field report — stat boxes, splits, a satellite basemap, the full activity breakdown — rides along with Pro. Same PDF idea either way; Pro just goes deeper.

That's the through-line for everything I build: your stuff should be yours, portable, and readable without asking permission — including when you hand it to someone else. A PDF turned out to be the most honest way to do that. It's how sharing works today.

Download GeoJSONic on the App Store →

So when I built a place to keep the places in my life, I built it the opposite way.

GeoJSONic has no backend

There's no account. No sign-up. No server that receives your notes, because there is no server. When you write a note, it's saved on your phone, as a file, in the app's own storage. I never see it. I couldn't see it if I wanted to — there's nowhere for it to go.

This isn't a privacy setting you toggle. It's the architecture. The free app never even makes a network connection for your data. A few features ask a service a narrow question — a coordinate goes to Apple to turn into a place name or a weather reading — and the answer comes back and gets stored in your file. That's it. No profile, no ad SDK, no tracking you across apps you've never heard of.

Why give up the easy money?

Because the easy money is the trap. The reason so many apps are "free" is that you're the product — your locations, your habits, your attention, packaged and sold. A map of everywhere you've been is about the most valuable thing you could hand a company, and most map apps are built to collect exactly that.

I didn't want to be in that business. I wanted to make something I'd trust with my own family's whereabouts. You can't do that and also be quietly monetizing the data. So I don't. GeoJSONic makes money the old-fashioned way: the journal and the online globe are free; some people pay a few dollars a month for offline maps and the field tools that ride with them. That pays for the map tiles. The end.

A map of your life is too important to keep on someone else's computer.

What you get for it

Permanence. Your journal outlives the app, the company, and me. It's a standard file you can read, back up, and open in other tools forever. If I get hit by a bus, your notes are fine.

And a kind of quiet you can't fake. No feed refreshing for your attention. No "someone viewed your location." No algorithm deciding which of your memories to show you. Just your notebook, on your phone, where you left it.

That's not a limitation I'm apologizing for. It's the reason the thing exists.

Download GeoJSONic on the App Store →

GeoJSONic is the other thing. It's a field journal for the places in your life, and it works like a notebook does: you write in it, it's yours, and nobody else is in the room.

A note is a place, and everything around it

Open the app, tap +, and you've pinned where you are. Write what happened. Add a photo, a video, a voice memo. The app quietly records the context of the moment along with it — the coordinate, the elevation, your heading and speed, the local time, the place name, even a snapshot of the weather. Not so it can profile you. So that years from now the note still means something: where you stood, and what the world was doing when you stood there.

You don't need a signal for any of it. That's the whole point. The best places are usually the ones with no bars — the trailhead, the back forty, the middle of the drive. GeoJSONic captures there and asks nothing of the network.

The file is the feature

Here's the part that matters most, and it's the part no other app will tell you: your journal is a plain file, and you can hold it.

Every note is a GeoJSON Feature — an open standard (RFC 7946), the same format working cartographers and open-data projects use. Your words and the sensor reading of the moment live side by side in the file, in plain text you could read with your own eyes. Back up your entire journal as a single .geojson and open it anywhere. There's no export that loses something, because there's nothing to export from — the file on disk already is the journal.

That means no lock-in. If GeoJSONic vanished tomorrow, your notes wouldn't. They'd still be sitting there, readable, yours.

See it on the globe

The free app is complete — capture, keep, share, and see your life on a 3D globe. Every note as a pin, your routes and scouted areas drawn in place; spin the earth and watch your years accumulate. No paywall between you and the map.

GeoJSONic Pro is for the parts that cost real money to run in the field: turn-by-turn navigation, virtual rides through your saved routes, offline map areas so the globe works with no signal, satellite imagery for ground truth, and the measurement workflow when you're scouting a boundary or writing a field report. The split is honest — free is the journal and the online map; Pro is the maps that work when the bars disappear.

Who it's for

People who go places and want to remember them truthfully — the property owner walking a fence line, the hunter marking a stand, the family on a long drive, anyone who'd rather keep a real journal than feed a feed.

It's the offline location journal you own. Not a service you rent. A notebook you keep.

Download GeoJSONic on the App Store →