You start a trip
One tap when you head out. That is the entire interaction Ryokōya asks of you for the rest of the day.
旅行屋 — ryokō-ya, “the travel shop.” A travel journal for iPhone.
Walk the city.
We'll keep the diary.
Start a trip and put your phone in your pocket. Ryokōya notices the café you sat in, the walk between the stops, and the neighborhood you crossed without meaning to — then hands you back the day as a story worth keeping.
iPhone · Coming to the App Store · Your trips stay in your own iCloud
A city pack in progress, and the map you walk it with.
Why it exists
By nine at night, the day has already started to go.
You land somewhere you have never been and you do the right thing: you walk out with no plan. A courtyard you did not mean to find. A counter with six seats and a menu you cannot read. A bridge, a bookshop, a bar where the barman writes your name on the tab in chalk.
Then you are back at the hotel with your shoes off, and someone asks where you went. And what you have is: a street beginning with V. Somewhere near the water. The one with the blue door.
That is not a bad memory — it is what a new city does to everybody. Names do not stick because nothing around them is familiar yet. At home you would hang the day on the dentist and the number 14 bus. Here there is nothing to hang it on, and by the time you are home the whole week has quietly become “that trip where we walked a lot.”
Ryokōya was built for that hour. You did not have to remember, because it was remembering — every stop, how long you stayed, the walk that joined them, and the weather while you were out there. The blue door has a name now, an address, and the photograph you took of it.
It also does the tedious half for you: the places you stopped at are saved as you go, so “where was that place?” is a list you already have rather than an evening spent scrolling backwards through a map.
An example day, handed back
Tuesday · Lisbon
6.8 km · 4 neighborhoods · 11,240 steps · 24°
- 08:51Praça do Comércio24m
- 10:12Livraria Bertrand41m
- 12:35Mercado da Ribeira1h 14m
- 15:02Miradouro de Santa Luzia38m
- 19:40Tasca do Beco1h 06m
That last one is the blue door.
What you bring home
Three months later, a friend books the same city.
By then the trip has flattened out. The photographs are in the roll somewhere between a boarding pass and a cat. What most of us can offer is enthusiasm and a shrug — there was a place near the station, tiny, incredible, I never got the name.
You have the map. Every stop from that trip was gathered into a collection while you walked it, with the city's name on the front and the places in the order you found them. Not the ones you meant to go to. The ones you went to.
It opens as a map rather than a list — pins where you actually stood, each one still carrying its name, its neighborhood, how long you stayed and the photograph you took there. Rename it, prune it, keep the eleven that mattered. It is yours to edit, and it does not expire when the trip does.
And it leaves whenever you want it to. Any pin opens in Apple Maps or Google Maps for directions the next time you are standing nearby. The whole collection goes to whoever asked — as a card like these two, as plain text they can read in a message, or as a file their own map app will happily swallow.
Which is the quiet part: a trip you can hand to somebody. Not a recommendation you half-remember, but twelve places you can vouch for, because you were standing on every one of them.
Two collections, shared exactly as they leave the app.
The whole idea
Three things happen. You do one of them.
It watches quietly
Arrivals, departures, the route between them, the neighborhoods you cross. In your pocket, screen off, nothing to remember.
You get the day back
A written story, a map of where you actually went, stamps for the neighborhoods you earned, and a card worth posting.
The next question, always
“Won’t that destroy my battery?”
It is the right question. An app that watches your location all day is exactly the kind of thing that hands you a dead phone at six in the evening, which on a trip is worse than no journal at all.
The honest version is that Ryokōya used to be wasteful, and we have the log that proved it. One evening in an izakaya, it sat asking iOS for the most precise fix available roughly once a second for an unbroken hour — and threw away nearly every one of them, because a person sitting at a table is not moving anywhere worth drawing.
So it stopped doing that. Ryokōya now runs at four different settings and picks between them by what is actually happening. The expensive one is reserved for the case that earns it: you, walking, with a route worth recording.
One thing it deliberately does not do is let iOS pause tracking to save power. That switch exists, and it is tempting, but iOS hands the restart to a system that can be kilometers late — which would quietly break the one promise this app makes, that you can forget it is running. Spending less is fine. Missing the walk home is not.
- Walking Finest fix available, every 5 meters The part you actually want drawn
- On a train or ferry Finest fix, every 30 meters A straight line needs fewer points
- Just stopped somewhere Finest fix, briefly Working out where you are
- Settled in Coarse positioning, every 20 meters It knows the place. It only has to notice you leave.
What you end up with
A travel journal that writes itself, and never makes things up.
The route, not the highlights reel
Every walk, ferry and subway leg, drawn as it happened — including the parts where your screen was off.
A story in your own day's words
Written from what actually happened. If Ryokōya didn't see it, it doesn't claim it — absence reads as absence.
Stamps you have to earn
Neighborhood seals and city crowns that only mint when you genuinely arrived. No participation trophies.
A book, not a feed
Every trip lays out as a designed book — city page, story, maps, your photos — and exports as a PDF to keep or print yourself. Ordering a hardcover in-app is coming later.
Your photos, in the right places
Pictures you took are matched to the stops where you took them, so the journal fills itself in.
Plans for the trip ahead
Build a route before you fly, check the weather window, and watch your wishlist light up as you get near it.
One pack open, and the roster it came from.
City packs
Thirty-one cities, curated by hand and checked by hand.
Not a scrape of the top-rated anything. Every place in a Ryokōya pack was chosen for a reason, written up in a sentence worth reading, and verified — coordinates, opening doors, and whether it still exists at all.
Each city has a tabitomo: a small local companion with a story of their own, who turns up in your trip summaries and signs your books. Gigi guards Paris. Pon works Tokyo. Coo runs New York, badly.
31Cities today
173Packs
1,798Places
1Free pack each
More cities are being curated and will arrive in updates — packs you already own are never affected, and every new city ships with a free pack so you can try it before buying anything.
The tabitomo
Every city keeps someone who shows you around.
A tabitomo (旅友, “travel friend”) is the small local spirit of a city — each with folklore of their own, written rather than generated. They turn up in your trip summaries, react to what you actually did, and sign your books. Thirty-one so far, one waiting in every city.
What it costs
The journal is the free part.
Not a trial, not a teaser, not three trips and a wall. Recording your days is what Ryokōya is for, and it does not cost anything.
Free, with no account to pay for
Freeand not the trial kind
- Unlimited trips. No cap, no archive limit, no trip held hostage.
- The whole route, drawn as you walked it — including the hours your screen was off.
- Every place you stopped, detected and named while you were there.
- The written story of each day, and the map that goes with it.
- Neighborhood stamps and city crowns, earned on foot.
- Favorites collections — save, edit, and share them anywhere.
- Share cards for trips, collections, stamps and crowns.
- A free starter pack in all 31 pack cities, so the collecting game is playable without spending a dime.
- Three trip plans on the go at once.
- Preview your trip book, page by page.
Ryokōya Pro
$2.99a month, or $24.99 a year
- iCloud sync and backup, across your devices
- Automatic photo matching, stop by stop
- Email story summaries, and saving your trip book as a PDF
- Trip Radar — a nudge when a saved place is near
- Walk View, first-person and street-level
- GPX export of every walk
- Unlimited trip plans
Or $69.99 once and it is yours outright, forever — no subscription, no renewal, nothing to cancel.
$6.99
once
Trip Pass — thirty days of everything
Every Pro feature for a month, and then it stops on its own. No subscription to remember, nothing to cancel, no renewal that arrives eleven months after you got home. If you travel twice a year, two of these still cost less than a year of Pro — which is the point of offering it.
$2.99
a pack
Tabitomo City Packs — a game laid over a real city
A dozen real places, chosen by hand and themed: the pizza route, the terrace crawl, the icons everybody means when they name the city. You complete one by turning up, and a tabitomo — the city’s own small creature — keeps you company while you do. Every city includes one free, and a whole city’s set costs less as a bundle.
The part most travel apps get wrong
Your movements are the most personal data you have.
Ryokōya is built by one person, sells software rather than attention, and has no reason to know where you were. So it doesn't.
- No trackers, no analytics, no ad networks. There are no third-party SDKs in the app at all — not one.
- Your trips live on your device, and in your iCloud if you turn on backup. There is no Ryokōya server holding your history.
- This website loads nothing from anyone else. No fonts, no scripts, no pixels, no cookies.
- Share cards leave your home out of it — the first and last stop of a trip never appear on anything you post.
- Nothing is watched between trips unless you ask for it. One optional setting can notice a City Pack place while no trip is running. It ships switched off, and you are the one who turns it on.
Before you download it
Things it does not do, said plainly.
It needs “Always” location, and it will ask twice
Recording a walk from your pocket is the whole app, and iOS only offers “Always” on a second prompt. Granting “While Using” leaves it looking broken through no fault of its own.
It wants to be outdoors
It is deliberately skeptical of a wandering GPS signal, so a phone sitting still on a desk draws nothing. That is the same caution that keeps a scribble off your map in a city of tall buildings.
It is not a navigation app or a fitness tracker
No turn-by-turn driving, no training plans, no rings to close. It counts your steps because they belong in the story, not because it has opinions about them.
Stamps and packs do not cover everywhere yet
Neighborhood stamps need curated boundaries — 51 cities so far — and City Packs cover 31. Trips, routes, places and stories work anywhere on earth.
iPhone only, in English
No iPad app, no Android, no web version, and one language at launch. It is built by one person, and doing a few things properly beat doing everything thinly.
It will not invent your day
If Ryokōya did not see something, it does not claim it happened. A gap in the story is a gap, not a guess dressed up as a memory.
Some days deserve a record.
Ryokōya is coming to the App Store for iPhone. Questions before then are welcome — there is a real person at the other end.