Good questions, honestly answered

Nobody, until you add someone. When you add a friend by code, you each see the other’s entire map — there are no per-place or per-trip controls, so adding someone is the whole decision. Friends of your friends see nothing. No public feed, no browsing strangers’ maps.

It links the two of you, symmetrically, from an 8-character code or a QR. There’s no request and no approval step — they redeem your code and you’re connected. There are no groups to join and nobody else is added along with them. One swipe removes someone, and they stop seeing your map immediately.

No. maple never tracks your live location. Every pin is one you added on purpose — by searching a city, by long-pressing the map, or by approving a suggestion from your own photos — and every one snaps to the nearest city, so a pin says “Lisbon”, not your street.

Only the metadata, and only if you say yes. maple reads the date and location stamped on each photo — it never opens, uploads or displays a picture, and there’s no way to attach one to a pin. It uses that to work out which cities you were in and when, then shows you a list to approve. Nothing lands on your map until you tap it, places near home are left out, and shared albums are skipped entirely.

Four taps, not five stars: Loved, Liked, Meh, or N/A. A pin also holds a note and one of six colours — Forest, Rust, Gold, Teal, Indigo or Plum — plus the year you travelled, which maple asks for as you add it. Tap “Not sure” and it stays undated: it still counts toward your all-time totals, it just sits out the year-by-year figures until you fill it in. Been somewhere twice? A city keeps every visit rather than overwriting the last one.

maple is a native iPhone app, and it’s not on the App Store just yet. Email hello@maple.app and we’ll let you know the day it lands. Signing in is email and password for now — Sign in with Apple isn’t there yet. Android isn’t on the cards either — if enough people ask, that changes.

Yes. Your map, your pins and your passport all work on your own — the leaderboard and overlap are simply the parts that switch on once someone else is there. Adding friends is never required.

You do it yourself, in the app: You › Account › Delete account. It asks once whether you’re sure, then permanently removes your account, every pin, every visit and every friend link, and signs you out. There’s nothing to email and nobody to wait for.