For more than ten years, Foursquare was my location memory.
Not because I cared that much about points or mayorships. I liked having a private-ish trail of where I had been: jobs, trips, meals, my wedding in Palm Springs, my son’s birth at Sint Lucas Andreas in Amsterdam. A check-in was a tiny timestamp that could pull the rest of the memory back later.
Then the product changed, the feeds went away, my calendar connection broke, and the thing I had been using as personal infrastructure started feeling like somebody else’s abandoned feature.
The point was never really Foursquare. The point was the memory layer. I wanted a way to ask, “Where was I when that happened?” and get an answer from my own records.
Why I kept checking in
I signed up for Foursquare on June 2, 2009. I was (super)user number 14,488, which is exactly the sort of early-user trivia that only matters if you were there and if you have a personality defect about preserving old account metadata.
For ten years I checked in almost everywhere I went. Different jobs, long days, weird little lunches, trips, the big life markers, the places I would have forgotten entirely if I did not have some small external hook to catch them on. My wedding in Palm Springs is in there. My son’s birth at Sint Lucas Andreas in Amsterdam is in there. A lot of ordinary Tuesdays are in there too, which may be the more useful part.
That history became valuable in a way the gamification never did. I mostly did not care about badges, points, or mayorships. They were fun enough in the early Foursquare era, but they were not the reason the habit stuck. The habit stuck because a place and a timestamp are often enough to bring back the rest of a day.
This was never about tracking other people. It was about giving myself a memory hook. I do not have a perfect autobiographical memory, and I do not particularly want to pretend that I do. But if I can see that I was in a specific neighborhood, restaurant, office, airport, hospital, or hotel on a specific date, my brain usually does the rest.
That is what made the calendar connection so important. Foursquare was not just a social app to me. It was feeding a personal log that I could search later.
When the platform stopped serving the habit
Over the last couple of years, the official Foursquare app turned off the feeds and my calendar connection went down. They had warned that this day would come, and then the old feeds stayed alive long enough that I started treating them like plumbing. Eventually, the plumbing failed.
I put a quick fix into place. I downloaded my Foursquare user data, parsed it into a structure I could import into my calendar, and got the historical record back where I wanted it. For new check-ins, an IFTTT applet could still send Foursquare activity to the same calendar, but it was unreliable enough that I never trusted it as the permanent answer.
All of that made the whole system feel temporary. I had more than a decade of location history, but the thing maintaining the habit had become fragile. Worse, Foursquare itself was becoming a different kind of company. The consumer check-in app that had created the habit was fading, while the value of the accumulated location data moved elsewhere.
That is the platform-memory problem in miniature: the product trains you to build a record, then the record outlives the product you trusted to keep it useful.
Building the smallest tool that solved it
I have been slowly learning iOS development for years. Really slowly. I started with Objective-C, then Swift, and most recently SwiftUI. Every year or so I pick up where I left off, learn something new, push it a little further, get frustrated, and put it down again.
This last weekend, I finally knew enough to build the small thing I had wanted all along.
Where/When is not a sophisticated app, and I am not pretending to be an iOS expert. But that was also part of the point. I had lived with the problem long enough to know exactly what the tool needed to do, and almost everything else could be left out.
The app did not need a feed. It did not need followers. It did not need recommendations or a discovery layer or a public profile. It needed to let me say, “I am here, and I may want to remember that later,” then put that record somewhere I already trust and already search.
That place, for me, is my calendar.
What Where/When does
Where/When is deliberately small. When I am somewhere I want to remember, I can manually check in and save a title, a note, the raw GPS coordinates, and an Apple Maps link directly to my calendar. That is basically it.
No feed. No leaderboard. No social graph. No company trying to guess where I go next.
Because the first version does not send anything to my own server or maintain its own giant place database, it labels each check-in with the best location information available: a place name if it can find one, otherwise an address, otherwise raw coordinates. That makes it less polished than a dedicated location platform, but it also keeps the app simple and private by design.
No data is shared with anyone or anything. The app writes the record to the calendar I choose, and the data stays mine.
The result is a private location diary that lives alongside the rest of my time. If I want to know where I was on a day, I look at my calendar. If I want to remember why that day mattered, the place is often enough to get me there.
Why owning this record matters
This is the same reason I keep coming back to small owned tools. The point is not to rebuild every platform by hand. The point is to know which parts of your life are important enough that you do not want them trapped inside someone else’s product roadmap.
Location history is sensitive. It should be treated that way. But it is also useful, especially when it is a record I keep about myself for my own memory. A decade of check-ins taught me that the data mattered. Foursquare taught me the habit. Platform decay taught me that I needed another place for the record to live.
Where/When was my attempt to keep that habit alive privately, locally, and on my own terms.
I put Where/When on the App Store, and I put it on Product Hunt at the time, mostly because shipping anything at all felt like a milestone. The app was small, but the problem was not. I wanted a way to remember where I had been without handing the whole system back to a platform that had stopped serving the job.