Atlas Obscura Travel Guide 12+

The app I’ve dreamed of from Atlas Obscura

I love Atlas Obscura and they’ve needed to move their Atlas to app format for years. This app makes it easier and more fun to explore and add places in your own community that are amazing but relatively unknown!

Highly recommend the app because it makes it easier to see what's interesting around you. Very good for travel, but also worth checking out the “ordinary” places you go because I've found some cool things I didn't know existed.

Needs work

Look I love atlas obscura and I use this app literally all the time. It has serious bugs- when you press the options to note if you’ve been to a place or would like to go to it, the app freezes for a time until it’s ok to use again. Very slow. Also, the loading takes a really long time with the ad at the start, like 1-2 minutes. It crashes often, or forgets my login info and I have to restart the app. In general, it’s not very good. I turn to using just the regular atlas obscura page in my browser often when out and about to compensate, but I want to use this app with amazing potential! It just needs a thorough debugging and someone with good coding skills to go through, put some money on this atlas obscura, it could be so so great. Also there should be a rating system for entries- some things on here aren’t really fit for the “obscura” definition, like boring historians get lost, get cooler, find better spots that fit here not just random history factoids that amuse you but nobody else. It needs a clean up and more curating by users.

Great app but very buggy

I absolutely swear by using this app when I travel to find amazing sightseeing and experiences and real world "Easter eggs"... but it isn't without its frustrastions:

- Currently, newly marked places I've visited no longer give me a grey flag. This makes it confusing to see where I should go next. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling even, to no avail.
- After awhile with the app in use, you'll get an error message "something went wrong" and can't mark anything, and you'll need to restart the app and refind the location to mark. I've had this problem since I started using this a whole year ago and it is still not resolved!!

Also, as a suggestion, I like that places that are permanently closed are still featured, but could be helpful to give them a distinguished color marker, like red or something (but still allow gray flag for those who visited before shutdown).

Also, when clicking "Directions", it uses my Google Maps, but would be nice if it have me the option to use Apple Maps instead (like Happy Cow app lets me do).

I want to give it 5 stars, but these bugs sometimes break my flow while I'm exploring.

Developer Response ,

Thank you very much for your detailed feedback. We're working on fixes for precisely these issues with map markers and error that you mention, as well as better indicators on the map about what you're seeing. In the meantime please feel free to reach out at appfeedback@atlasobscura.zendesk.com if there's anything else you'd like to discuss or add. Thanks!