Pin the places that matter — home, work, school — and PinPal says who arrived and when. Open it and everybody who is sharing is on a map, with how long ago each reading came in. No account, nothing to pay.
Open PinPal What it doesAn example, drawn rather than photographed. Every name, place and street on this page is invented.
Where is everybody now? Open it and they are on a map, each with the age of the last reading beside them — because a map that puts somebody at work four hours after they left is worse than a blank one.
Has anybody arrived? Pin a place, give it a radius, and the phone says when somebody crosses it. That works with the app shut and the screen off, which is the part a web page cannot do on its own.
A family, a carpool, a set of friends. Each is its own group with its own places and its own people, and they are kept apart by arithmetic rather than by a setting: a group is a code, the code is the key, so a different group is a different key. One group literally cannot read another — not “is not allowed to”, cannot.
You see every group you are in, because you hold every code. Nobody else sees past the one they were invited to.
A web page cannot watch where you are once the screen is off — that is a rule of the browser, not something PinPal can work around. BuzzPal is the small Android app that does it, and it is the same one ShopPal uses to buzz you at a shop, so most people already have it.
Without it PinPal still works: everybody is on the map while the app is open. You lose being told without looking.
Somewhere the family spends a few hours — a weekend away, a week at the coast — is remembered, and you can flip back through it by month. Only the rough spot is kept, to about a kilometre, with when you arrived and when you left.
Coarse on purpose: at that size it is a memory of a town, and kept precisely it would be a record of which house somebody slept at. It is the one thing here that is never thrown away, so each entry can be deleted.
Places, arrivals and — while you are sharing it — your position go to our own server, sealed with a key made from your group’s code, which the server has never been given. It can tell that two things belong to one group, and nothing else.
Your position is kept as one line that gets overwritten, not as a trail: a phone sharing all day leaves exactly one entry behind, and stopping removes it rather than hiding it. Arrivals older than a fortnight are dropped everywhere.
The map is the one outside service — while it is open, openstreetmap.org sees roughly which area you are looking at, and never what you pinned. There is no account, no advertising and nothing to pay.
Your group’s code is the key everything is locked with, which is why the server cannot read any of it — and it is why there is no way to reissue one. Nobody has a copy to re-lock your places with. Keep it somewhere that is not a phone.
Open it, then use your browser’s menu — Install app on Android, or Add to Home Screen from the share button on an iPhone. It then opens like any other app, with its own icon.
PinPal is one of a family of small apps — see the rest. Get these apps on your phone — the checklist gives the exact two steps for the browser you are holding, and remembers where you got to.