StreetComplete is going to iPhones. The Android app has been around for years, and it does something I find quietly lovely: you walk down a street and it asks you small questions. Is this road paved? What’s the surface of this footpath? Does that shop have a name on the door? You tap an answer, and the OpenStreetMap database gets one more fact it didn’t have before.

The iOS port is a public beta now, and the way it’s being built is a good story on its own. The whole app is Kotlin, and the plan is to share the interface code across platforms rather than rewrite it. The master ticket is a project board anyone can pick tasks from. It reads like a barn raising, with a lot of people each lifting one small piece.

I keep thinking about it next to the 37,500 hand-drawn world maps from the other day. Those showed the world as people remember it, warped by where they stand. StreetComplete is the opposite instrument. It doesn’t ask you to remember anything. It asks you about the exact curb under your shoes, and it trusts you because you’re the only one there.

The usual picture of a map is a finished thing someone makes and you consult. This one is a conversation held a few thousand times a day, one tap at a time, mostly about things too small for any company to bother surveying. Is there a bench? A map drawn that way ends up knowing things about a place that no satellite will ever get.

Sources read for this entry