How WhereToGo works, and what it is for
24 October 2026 · by the developer, spdev labs Ltd · 6 min read
WhereToGo is a live map of the places people are at right now. This is the long version of what that means: what the app does, what it is good for, and the few things it refuses to do.
The problem it started from
Every time I moved to a new city the same thing happened. The map showed me ten thousand places. The review sites showed me what strangers thought three years ago. And the only information I actually wanted, where people like me go on a Thursday night and whether it is any good right now, lived in the heads of friends I did not have yet.
Review scores do not answer that question. A place can be rated 4.6 and empty, or rated 3.9 and the best room in the city tonight. What answers it is two things: people whose taste you trust, and a sense of where the crowd actually is. WhereToGo is built around exactly those two things, and nothing else.
Two ways to look at a city
The map has two modes, and the switch between them is the heart of the app.
Popular is the map when nobody has told it anything yet. Tens of millions of real places, each with its own photograph, laid out so you can read a neighbourhood at a glance instead of scrolling a list. Filter it to cafés, bars, restaurants, parks or museums, whatever you are in the mood for. This is what a new user sees in a city nobody has posted in, and it is already useful on its own.
Crowded is the map lit up by people. A pin that reads 17 means seventeen people are at that place this minute. Not a rating, not a review from last year, a count. It is the fastest way I know to tell whether a bar is worth the walk before you walk.
Posting a place
A post in WhereToGo is a place, a photo, and a real pin. You stand somewhere you love, or remember somewhere you love, and you post it with its actual location. The app shrinks the photo and strips the camera's metadata before it leaves the phone, so the picture travels but your camera's own GPS stamp and serial number do not.
That is deliberately the whole post. There are no stories, no filters, no ranking of your taste against anyone else's. The point of a post is that a friend can open the map in that city and see the place where you would have sent them.
Following people, not algorithms
You follow people whose taste you trust. Their places appear in your feed and on your map, and that is the only curation there is. Nothing is recommended to you by an engine, nothing is promoted, and there are no adverts anywhere in the app. If you follow nobody, you see the Popular map and the Crowded counts. If you follow ten people who know a city, you have the city.
Accounts can be private, so only approved followers see what you post. And every field of your profile, your photo, your age, your bio, your location and your presence, has its own visibility setting, so you decide what each group of people gets to see.
Every place has a conversation
Each place has its own thread. Not a feed of what people posted, but a place to ask the people who are there: is the terrace open, are there tables left, is it worth queuing. It is the question you would ask a friend who happened to be inside, asked of whoever is.
How the counts work, and what the app does not keep
This is the part people care about most, so here it is precisely.
- Counted, not named. Being counted at a place is anonymous by default. Nobody sees your name or picture at a place until you choose, in your privacy settings, whether followers or everyone may see you there. Until then you are a number in a count.
- Only your latest position. The app keeps one position per person and overwrites it each time. There is no trail, no history, no "where were you last Friday", because that data is never stored in the first place.
- Background location is optional, and lazy. If you allow it, the app does not poll your location on a timer. Your phone tells it when you have moved a few hundred metres, and only after you have stayed somewhere for about a quarter of an hour does the app record that place, so it can count you. Nothing is recorded while you are moving. You can decline this at sign-in and switch it off at any time.
- Aggregated before it is shown. A place is described as busy only once enough people are there that no individual could be picked out of the number.
- No advertising identifier. The app does not collect it, so nothing in it can be used to target you anywhere. The privacy policy is one page and lists every item collected in one table.
Delete your account and all of it goes: posts, photos, comments, follows, the stored position, the notification tokens. Permanently, from inside the app or from the website.
Who it is for
New in a city. Follow a few locals and the map fills with their places before you have made a single friend. Travelling. One map that follows you from Paris to Istanbul, in your language, with the same two modes everywhere. A group of friends. Post the places you would send each other to, and let the count tell you where everyone drifted tonight. Anyone tired of review scores. A live count of real people beats a star rating every time.
Where it is right now
WhereToGo went live on Google Play this week, which means honesty is cheap: your city is probably quiet. The Popular map works everywhere from the first day, because it is built from tens of millions of real places with photographs. The Crowded map and the feed fill up as people in a city post and follow. The first place you post is the one that starts your city.
It is free, it has no adverts and no plans for any, and it runs on Android 8 and up in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Hindi. An iPhone version is next.
Questions, or something that looks wrong? contact@getwheretogo.com. The privacy policy is at getwheretogo.com/privacy.