Consumer App · Agentic Coding · iOS · Travel
Wanderlist
A travel app I built from scratch for collecting places, planning trips, and collaborating with friends.
- Role
- Designer · Engineer
- Company
- Solo Project
- Year
- 2026
- Stack
- Vibe coded with Cursor + Claude Code - React + TypeScript, Vite, Supabase, Capacitor (iOS), Vercel
- APIs
- Google Maps + Places
Wanderlist is a travel app I designed and built solo. It started as a way to keep track of places I wanted to visit, and grew into a full planning tool with shared guides, day-by-day itineraries, and live collaboration.
What I built
- Place collections ("Guides") with categories, notes, photos, and map view.
- Multi-leg itineraries with drag-and-drop scheduling across days and time slots.
- Sharing via links for both guides and itineraries, with per-user collaborative notes.
- Logistics capture (flights, hotels, rentals) with PDF/OCR parsing into structured data.
- Auth, row-level security, and real-time updates on Supabase.
- Native iOS build via Capacitor.
The origin story
I've always tracked every restaurant, activity, hotel, and shop I visit so I can share real recommendations with friends. Google Maps guides never cut it for me because the sharing was limited and building custom categories was a pretty painful user experience. For years I relied on an app called Out of Office (OOO), and when it was deprecated I lost three years of trip data overnight (along with other users I found in a Reddit thread who were equally as devastated as I was). So ahead of a trip I was planning to Paris, I decided to build exactly the app I wanted.
Guides
I started with Guides — a city guide that maps every place you save. I used the Google Maps API to pull business information, then layered on notes on each place, custom categories, and favorites. Your guide is like your personal bible for a city, so when friends text "Can you send me your recs for X city?" you have an answer.
Collaboration
Then the product grew as I shared it with other people and started actually using it. My friend was joining my Paris trip, so I built in collaboration, letting her add places she wanted to try, plus flexible export options to send recs as a text, an Apple Notes note, or a link to the live in-app guide.
Itineraries
Next I added a day-by-day itinerary planner that is also collaborative, and connected back to your guides so it writes to them automatically. I wanted to separate guides from itinerary because the guide is great as your city bible, but you also might want to know exactly what you did each day in that city on your last trip. There may have been things you did that you didn't love and wouldn't go back to, so I wanted to have a place to keep track of that as well.
Keeping my Data
Underneath it all, the thing I cared about most was never losing my data again. I created the concept of accounts and used Supabase to persist every trip and place, then wrapped the app with Capacitor for iOS.