- big update for iPad with lots of improvements to screens like the Home Screen, profile, groups, versus, atlas, and explore. - rivers and things defined by a line (like the Great Wall of China) have been added to all game types! features and bug fixes: - you can set a timer on a drill, timed drills move at versus speed - end of the drill has a "review the map" and redrill for locations with lower scores - new borders, lines, and routes practice map - added daily basics and daily clues game types - borders practice outlines no longer disappear when you zoom in - Sri Lanka's borders fixed / tightened - "1 miles" now reads as "1 mile" - picture clues shows the photographers name - repeatable achievements show how many players have achieved them - explore shows field notes - testing: universal links. If you tap on a link to maptap, and you have the app installed, it should bring you into the app ... I think?

New features - Free for all group points, and a leaderboard of the top groups in free for alls - Group banner: the leader's banner shows behind the group header, plus an image picker - In the daily game, at the end game screen, tapping the date ("October 19, 2026") hides the story panel so you can see your guesses more clearly - a new setting for whether you want your epic moments to appear site-wide or not. - Versus: a "Within 300" Elo range added for open challenges - Versus: two trusted accounts can now have up to 50 games / day. Bug fixes - A press made just before zero now counts in timed modes - Achievements toggle: turning it back on now sticks. - Yesterday's versus results no longer reopen over the new daily. - An ask for you to review MapTap will no longer pop up during a timed practice - Drills can now handle if you switch out and back into the app - Group page: "Achievements on Yesterday" fixed - Pins: end-game pole width scales with zoom, so pins no longer fill the screen. - Journey arcs (end of some daily games) are a little prettier now.

- adding a gauntlet leaderboard - fixing some mis-identified locations in explorer - drills end on a "drill complete" sheet with a summary - support for future UGC map features to be released soon - Top Scores Today now requires 1000+ Elo to qualify. - fixing bugs with epic moments (they show up on your profile and other player's profiles) - adding Japanese prefectures on explore and borders maps - daily pictures clues now pulls from the Atlas, which includes user-submitted photos. Will expand greatly the pool of photos. - better error messaging for states where you couldn't play versus - much better outlines for Norway

- in order to appear on the daily leaderboard, you now need a versus rank of at least 1000 (backpacker). If you can score 1000 in the daily game, every day, then backpacker is an easy rank to achieve! - more stats on your profile page to see how you do versus the whole community - support for new features in upcoming daily maps - adding "epic moments" to profile pages Fixes: - fixing a bug where on smaller phones with friendly challenges a button was out of reach - better borders for Norway, archipelagos, and Equatorial Guinea islands - drills skip the "keep going?" prompt - there's a setting in the game to operate on UTC time. It wasn't being honored everywhere. Better now.

- new rivers practice map (free) with the top 50 rivers in the world - "use UTC time", to allow you to (and friends) to standardize what day you are all playing on - improved province / state highlighting - prepping some new functionality for an upcoming daily game - tied group scores are now sorted by exact score, up to two decimal places. - timed drills no longer freeze when the timer runs out - drills no longer light up the wrong country for border towns. I hope. - group boards and profiles should show a player's current name after they rename.

- crash fix

- fixing a bug where some people couldn't login with google - fixing a highlight bug for mediterranean locations - added Jeju to South Korea (apologies to all Jeju residents) - fixing the top 10 share link - adding top group medals - monthly leaderboard now requires 1000 minimum Elo to place.

- fixing a crash bug with the new end-game arc points storytelling - adding sign in with google - adding new emojis for bad scores - lots of new achievements - new epic moments from across all of maptap - the stars in the background, when zoomed out, were backwards. To the player who figured this out and wrote in to me ... you are my kind of nerd. - tutorial could break on iPad. To the player who wrote in to me with lots of colorful language about how this made her feel ... I'm sorry! - picture clues on iPad could get insanely large (whups). this bug keeps coming back. fixed it again. - better country outlines in Niger, Chat, Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin, and Jamaica Versus - you can tap a challengers name in "available for you" and see their recent scores - your recent matches on the versus hub show round by round scores, with a replay globe button - friendlies and rated challenges can be filtered in the open list - open friendlies can be posted at a rank (Navigator, Cartographer, etc...) - added a "clean sweep!" when one person beats another for every round - fixed a bug where tapping accept more than once could create mayhem on the backend - if someone didn't play a round, they scored 0. now it says DNF Groups - new optional feature, "best tap", to see the group's score by taking the best play for each round from whichever user got the highest for that round Drills - added "play again" - drills can be edited from the group page

- added country flags to the scoring round visuals - improved the precision of guess and location pins across all game types - added outline data for Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland - timed drills move at the same speed as versus - free-for-all chat is now MapTap+ Fixed: - sometimes, markers could get left from a prior game on the globe. - sometimes the globe got possessed and would go off and do its own thing. exorcism completed. - finishing a player map right after a versus match could show the wrong end game screen, fixed - seas, gulfs, and bays should now score by polygon (click in the region)

- Epic Moments - Today's details now shows some of player's recent amazing achievements - extending teacher mode support in the iOS app. If you are a teacher, go to groups, and ask to be set up as a teacher. Teachers get: max groups goes from 3 to 10, max size of the group goes from 20 to 40. Groups made by teachers have no chat, and do not show up on leaderboards. - Updated visuals for some future daily game results ... you'll know it when you see it :) Fixes and minor stuff: - Player maps now points you to the web site to do this, if you want to give it a go - rounds where someone didn't finish now show as DNF, instead of 0 - starting a versus match could accidentally drop you on the daily's end game screen. Oof. Sorry! - Fixed some achievements that were impossible to earn: perfectly lost, bold strategy, king of the hill - sometimes a score wasn't reaching the server. it'll retry now. - reviewing a map after a versus game would leave those pins for the next game. This bug was squashed, then it came back to life, so it is resquashed. if fixing bugs gave real-life achievements, I'd get one for this one. - drills cap raised from 20 to 30 -

- crash fix for 2018 and earlier iPads - fix for the screen being overly dark when playing prior days - fix for xp gained not reporting correctly

Update August 31, 2026 - update notes will now appear in app (I think?) - Hall of fame / best of in Versus mode. A bunch of new leaderboards - Groups: additional support for teachers (teacher mode, reach out to me if you are a teacher and want to try this) - Groups: you can see group members achievements - Rolling in field notes to the end game screen for FFA, practice, frontier, etc. - Streak achievements should work cross platform now - Achievements show rarity - Fixing an issue where a drag and a pinch could get confused with each other

New - beginning the implementation of an upcoming 'teacher mode'. Some teachers have asked me for a way to use maptap for their classrooms. A teacher will have more groups, larger groups, but no chat (apparently, don't give competitive teenagers unrestricted chat with each other ... who knew??) - the orange snarky text is loved by some, and hated by others. There's now three options: snarky, facts, nothing - groups will now show how many 100 rounds each player has had so far this month - create practice drills for yourself and your group - date format now adjusts to what is standard based on your language settings - end game review in practice modes will now show provinces / states Fixes - player maps have grown! you can now page through them all, and search by name - accepting an open challenge could send you to the Home Screen instead of into the match. Whups - the 'play next challenge' button sometimes didn't. - FFA "view results" was showing a block of json code. oof. - Stopped drawing Western Sahara as part of Morocco, and added (very small) outlines for Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Lichetenstein, Vatican City, Guam, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, and Martinique) - Versus rounds weren't counting towards your atlas location coverage. It does now - Trivia mixing English with Chinese or Japanese broke mid-word

Features - beginning the roll out of drills, a new way to do practice maps - ocean color is now customizable. Find it frustrating to see the small islands? Set your ocean to a brighter blue. - additional versus challenge options - ability to transfer group ownership - search added to explore - the snarky text will now sometimes be replaced by facts for a location. - beginning the integration of per-location notes, which will start becoming available on the end game screen of practice games Bug fixes: - Finished games that failed to reach the server now have a recovery path - missed days showed days you had already played. fixed - The leaderboard challenge button would lie to you, which is quite rude. Fixed - Friend open challenges were blocked by rated daily cap. Fixed - Story heart

Features - new "borders" practice mode. There won't ever be borders in the daily game. But if you truly can't live without them, well, here you go. - new practice game "gauntlet". Plays like the new versus game, Free-For-All, but without the pressure of playing against everyone. - story collections! at the end of the daily game, you can heart a story and add it to your collection. you can also share just the story now. - in today's details there's now a page per story, with more details (including references for each story) Bug fixes: -Frontier's entry card now goes green + shows your score -Statesman achievement was unearnable. Whups. -Group invite code is selectable + tap-to-copy, on both surfaces -FFA lobby roster sorts by Elo -A versus match whose clock expired during a scoring reveal never finished

- Long daily practice is being retired. I'm replacing it with something new, coming soon. - overhaul on how experience and levels work. They are no longer a combination of your continent levels, which was confusing. you have an overall level which goes up with every experience point gained, and, continent skill levels which go up with every experience point earned per continent - made it so you can tap on some charts for more info Fixes: - some practice maps were dropping locations, fixed - fixing famous islands practice maps to better score against the geometry of an island chain - fixing a bug in the point-to-polygon distance formula. - improve versus matches data to include things like how much time left the players had - improving the versus cards to show more details - and versus stops giving you applause for a high score when you lose. - fixing where creating challenges wasn't keeping your preferences from one to the next - improving free-for-all to the latest version to support friendly matches and competitive ones

- fixed a versus loading bug, where the locations should be loading during the countdown but weren't - fixed versus page where it wasn't showing your recent matches - fixed free-for-all layout issues

- Explore mode ... just the globe, no game. See every location and filter by difficulty, global find rates, or for personal score. You can get to it from Practice maps. - Versus is now three tabs, rather than one giant, endless, painful scroll. - New setting, hide John's snarky comments. Do my comments make you mad? My mom would agree with you. - Group pages now show player-made maps from players in the group. Right now, the only way to make a map is with the web interface, at maptap.gg. - New Argentina Top 15 cities practice - a new game mode, free for all, is in this version but hidden. It needs more testing. Bug fixes: - emoji now render in globe trivia (sigh) - groups: 'start fresh' setting for when you make a new group, if you don't want it to back-populate scores prior to group creation date - a finger resting on the globe could score your next round. Whups. Fixed this. - sharing a game from a previously played date showed today's date. Fixed. - streak counting was being too kind about missed days. it is less kind now. - Share flags: Victoria, BC no longer shows a US flag, and Kosovo no longer shares a Serbia flag. That didn't cause any controversy at all. Nope. - some quality of life versus fixes (trying to improve the reliability of being able to accept open challenges that you see)

Bug Fixes: - fixing an issue where if you opened the app before midnight, and tried to play the daily game after midnight, it thought you had already played and gave you the scores from the day before. - achievement banners will no longer linger into the next game you play - improved the readability of score text over deserts - fixed the flag picker (where the country text was black on black, making it quite challenging to read!) - fixed a bug where if you started a player map, then left the app, then came back, you didn't return to the player map

- New achievements system, earn badges as you progress in your geography skills! - Play player-made maps! To to the menu at the top of the screen and discover and play maps made by players - Taps now tell you the population of the location - Tapping a shared map link and it now opens right in the app. - Fix for the app pausing when you select picture mode practice. - Fixed country practice scoring: tapping inside the United States, The Bahamas, or French Guiana now scores correctly instead of missing.

- Fixed a bug where a practice game's score could show up as your completed daily game. - New: show country flags in your shared score ... in your settings. - Fixed challenge-mode sharing so the text includes your per-round breakdown, not just the total. - Fixed a scoring bug in flags mode where countries that share the same flag should now recognize either answer. - Group "Today" rankings now follow your local day instead of server time. - Fixed profile standing text showing placeholder codes instead of your numbers in non-English languages. - Updated translations across all 12 languages.

New: - new setting: tap and hold to place pin. Hopefully better than "confirm tap mode". Leaving in confirm tap mode for now, and also defaulting the new mode to off while it gets some testing. But I'm optimistic this is going to be a lot better. - new setting: share to discord. the text for sharing to discord doesn't include a naturally resolving link. Added a setting for it. - in versus, consolidated many challenges so they don't clutter Bug fixes: - camera state sometimes wasn't cleared between different games of different types - reduced memory usage - if your phone was running hot, hopefully this makes that better - map fixes for Somalia border and label - fixing missing translation strings

Bug fixes: - (hopefully) fixing an issue some players were having where the game thought you were finished for the day when you hadn't yet played - added diagnostics / reporting in case my fix for this was wrong - fixing an issue where the challenge-round leaderboard didn't have scores from app players Versus: - if a challenge was already taken, let you initiate with that same player instead

• Fixed a crash that could happen after many rounds in Survival mode. • Flag practice: some country flags are nearly identical (Monaco/Indonesia, Romania/Chad). Tapping either country now counts as correct. • Fixed a problem where returning to "Today's Globe" after quitting a practice game partway through could do nothing. • Improved reliability of saving your daily game, including some rare cases where yesterday's game could show up as today's.

"My stats" got a big upgrade • Profile banners — pick the artwork at the top of your profile, including a globe • Your Standing: see where your score lands on the global curve, and your rank among all players this month • A new progress section that tracks your improvement over time • Versus players: your world rank now shows on your profile Bug fixes: • Fixed the bug where today's map could open "already played", with yesterday's rounds filled in. This was affecting ~1% of all users. Sorry :( • Closing the app mid-game no longer repeats a round you already answered, and a game finished right before closing now saves properly • Practice fix: taps inside the correct country now get full credit on country maps (coastal capitals like Freetown were being shortchanged) • Survival mode now shows a recap of every location after your run • Groups: browse past months' standings • The bug report form now works when you're not signed in • Challenge Round scores now post to the correct leaderboard