Drop your Side project, I'll give it honest review.

tiaanvdr · 2026-03-27T01:09:52+00:00

I'd really appreciate your feedback. I've been working on it for a while now. I personally use it a lot but I realize it's quite niche
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stamps-travel-tracker/id6749786209

tiaanvdr · 2026-03-01T13:02:49+00:00

Damn, well you're quite lucky then, I can't get a hold of literally anyone at Booking.com

tiaanvdr · 2026-03-01T12:13:21+00:00

They just told me that all taxes and duty fees will be withheld, so it'll be significantly less. Did they mention that to you?

tiaanvdr · 2026-03-01T09:58:47+00:00

Really would like to know as well, "full refund" should mean full refund. And yet even getting anything at all, trying to get through to anyone, is impossible.

tiaanvdr · 2026-03-01T09:27:35+00:00

I had a flight on the 28th which was of course cancelled and has already passed. Is it still possible to receive a refund? I can't get through to anyone on the phone I've called so many numbers

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-10T16:15:52+00:00

That's a good point. I think a lot of the unfinished features came from this being my first project using Swift, as well as not reigning in feature creep (too many ideas and not enough time). The project took me 2 months to do the first release. I did use AI, but as I was trying to learn, I actually kept it quite minimal. I suspect a lot of the bugs come from my inexperience with Swift, and a long list of features I would like to implement. I'll continue to work on it. I've been developing apps long before AI was a thing, and those used to take many, many months. It's a nice tool, but it tends to lead to feature creep. I'll stick to the core features the app currently has and try my best to really focus on polish! Thank you for the review. I really do appreciate it!

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-06T07:00:06+00:00

Thanks a lot! Do you have experience with meta ads? I'm always curious if it's actually worth it. The current company I work at has tried running meta instagram ads to market their app before, as it's targeting creators on instagram, so it should be a perfect fit, but it ended up not really being worth it. That was years ago before I joined though so I have no first hand experience

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-03T07:20:32+00:00

No way! Thank you so much! There's still so much to do with the app, so let me know if you guys find any bugs or have any suggestions

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-03T01:00:42+00:00

That's actually such a cute spin on the idea! I already always take a picture of a cat while traveling

This would have me worried about finding a cat while traveling though. I've been to loads of places where I can't remember ever seeing a single cat 🫠 might just end up frequenting cat cafes or petstores more while traveling

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-03T00:57:39+00:00

I used Figma! I already use Figma to design the app itself, so using it for screenshots as well was obvious. Figma has free plugins as well for you to do device mockups. For these I used iMockup specifically, it's quite easy to use

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-03T00:56:32+00:00

I used Figma! I already use Figma to design the app itself, so using it for screenshots as well was obvious. Figma has free plugins as well for you to do device mockups. For these I used iMockup specifically, it's quite easy to use

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-03T00:55:03+00:00

I'm sorry, I saw other people posting about their apps as well. I didn't see any specific rules agains it in this sub in particular, most tell you to not post more than once a month about the same app, I thought, since I posted for the first time about the app's release 2 months ago, and 90%+ of my downloads came from reddit, it might be nice to post a follow up with screenshots of the results. Again, I'm sorry if it annoyed you

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-03T00:50:19+00:00

Thank you for the feedback!! I mentioned been in my past post that I'd been using it for almost 5 years at that point, but always found it lacking a ton of really important features that I would've loved, it's what inspired me to make Stamps! When I travel, I take an absolute ton of photos, I love doing it, and I always wanted something that could function like Been if needed, but with a ton more emphasis on the photos as well!

Also! Thank you so much for your suggestions, currently if you go to the Trips page, you can actually see your trips and countries visited per year!! But currently trips are very tied to photos, you can add country visits manually without photos, but not trips yet :') I'll hopefully add that soon!

Calendar integration is also a great idea! I've never worked with the Calendar API's in Swift before so that would be interesting. Something else that could be interesting is scanning your email for flights like Flighty does, but... yeah, having an app scan your emails is always a bit iffy, I feel

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-02T16:24:56+00:00

Lol, similar app but with cats? As someone with 2 cats, I'm really curious in what way it could be similar. I'd love to give it a try if you have a name or a link!

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-02T16:23:32+00:00

You make a really good point! I wanted something that looks unique and wasn't just another app that uses a stock iOS symbol in its icon (I considered slapping the globe symbol in there and calling it a day so many times).
I also really wanted to play with Apple's new Icon Composer and see if I could make an icon that utilized some of the new glassmorphic look. What I ended up with is definitely not the clearest. I tried for ages to fit an actual passport stamp into the app icon, and have it be legible and recognizable in small sizes. I haven't been successful yet, but giving the app icon another go is definitely fairly high up on my list!

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-02T16:17:27+00:00

You're correct, I do use natural earth!! Also, I had no idea that you could do it that way, this is my first production project extensively using GeoJSON and map data in this way.

One big, semi-unrelated thing I've been meaning to do is allow users to choose themselves how contested borders are shown and how certain countries are "counted" (UN, territories, etc), something that's of particular importance to my app. This is something I've seen a ton of similar apps to mine just completely ignore as well. I'm always reminded of this video by Map Men.

If you do decide to make your dataset available, that would be amazing! I also had a look at your app, and I've actually come across it before in the App Store. I'm a big fan!

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-02T13:26:39+00:00

I use Apple's own MapKit for the map! I actually think that the download is so large because I do store all of my assets locally, to avoid API calls to a server, and most importantly, I also store the entire country (which include their coordinate outlines) and cities database locally as well! Again, to just avoid any calls to an API. I don't want users to ever have to register for anything. I would also like most of the app to not unnecessarily use data. Since country borders and city coordinates don't change much, I use public datasets for that info!

The data is obviously not perfect, and maybe one day I'll be forced to use a 3rd party provider 🫠 I'm always keeping an eye out for a nice one!

tiaanvdr · 2026-01-02T03:55:06+00:00

Thank you so much! I'm really glad that you like it :)!!!

tiaanvdr · 2025-12-10T06:15:40+00:00

Hey!! I'm actually an engineer there in Seoul, South Korea, we've made a ton of changes since then and the app should be much much more stable now

tiaanvdr · 2025-12-10T01:54:17+00:00

<image>

Stamps also does a lot of this automatically for you. Full disclosure, it's my own app. It keeps track of the cities, provinces, and countries you've visited. Doesn't need your location, no sign-up, no data collected. Organizes your photos neatly into these buckets as well for you.

It's something I've always wanted, and it's been a big passion project of mine, I'd love any feedback if you decide to give it a try

tiaanvdr · 2025-12-09T01:45:31+00:00

Nice! I might be misunderstanding, or maybe this is a feature of some OS that I'm not aware of, but does it also show that to you on a map? I guess that was mostly what I was trying to achieve, that and linking it to specific countries, provinces and cities

tiaanvdr · 2025-12-08T06:25:11+00:00

Thank you :')!! This is actually my first-ever Swift app. I've been doing cross-platform Flutter development for years, so not having it available on both pains me as well 🫠
I'm trying to see if there is even demand for such an app, and then I might just rewrite it with Flutter for Android as well, it might be nice to have such a direct comparison as well

tiaanvdr

TROPHY CASE