Tourlet

The trip that crosses cities, held in one place. (Draft tagline — not final.)

Open the web app The same trips as the phone app. Syncing to it is part of Tourlet Pro.

Tourlet is on Google Play (open testing) and in the F-Droid repository, and also runs in a browser. This page describes the app as it actually is, not a plan for one — it will keep changing as the app does, not backdated to look further along than it is.

The problem it is meant to solve

Planning a trip usually ends up spread across a dozen places: a flight confirmation email, a hotel booking in another app, a shared document with the day-by-day plan, a photo of a train ticket, a note with the Wi-Fi password for the flat. None of it is in one place, and the one moment it matters most — standing at a gate, or a platform, with patchy signal — is the moment it is hardest to go and gather. That moment is sharpest on a trip that moves between cities: the thing most likely to go wrong with patchy signal is not “what time is the museum” but “what time, in which timezone, does the overnight train actually get in.”

Tourlet is built for the trip that moves between cities, joined by long legs — a domestic flight, a high-speed or overnight train, a ferry, a long-haul bus — the kind of trip (Beijing → Chengdu → Shenzhen is the case it was designed against) where a day-by-day planner built around one destination has no natural place for the leg that actually shapes the trip. Tourlet holds that leg as a first-class thing, alongside the places it connects: one itinerary, on the device that travels with you, readable without hunting through email, and readable without signal.

What it does today

• An Android app, phone first (name.gpm.tourlet): a trip is a sequence of places joined by legs — flights, trains, buses, ferries — each shown in its own local time zone, not squeezed into a single day-by-day plan built around one destination.
• A map of the trip and place search as you type, on every build and in the web app. The Play build uses Google Maps and Google Places by default; the F-Droid build and the web app use OpenFreeMap tiles and Photon (komoot) place search. The Map tab also has a “my location” button: it asks for location permission only when you tap it, and the position it shows is drawn on your phone and never sent anywhere. The web app’s map has the same button, using the browser’s own geolocation, on click only.
• Sign in with an email address and a mailed code, or with Google (Play build). Signing in is free; it is what Tourlet Pro turns into syncing a trip across your phones and to the web app, sharing a trip with the people going on it, and sending the plan to a paired Wear OS watch — accepting a trip somebody else shared with you is always free.
• Tourlet Pro is a subscription, with a 7-day trial. Free, on every build: up to 10 trips of your own, with a planned budget — trips shared with you do not count against that limit.
• Record my route (Pro, off by default): if you turn it on for a trip, the app records where you go, at one of three accuracy levels, in a foreground service with a notification that stays on screen while it runs. The points are uploaded to our server and are visible to that trip’s other members. With it off, nothing reads where the device is except the “my location” button above, and that never leaves the phone. The Play build therefore declares the approximate and precise location permissions.
• Also in Pro, each switched on by you and never in the background: suggestions (only when you ask; the trip’s structured data goes from our server to an AI model, with a web search step), flight lookup and watching (the flight number and date go through our server to a flight-data service; alerts are notifications made on your phone), attachments (receipts and tickets, stored on our server and visible to the trip’s members), lists of places, a cover photo for a trip (your own, or one from Unsplash), and a public read-only link the owner can turn on and off. The Privacy Policy says what each one sends and to whom.
• The web app at tourlet-app.gpm.name edits the same synced trips. Members of a trip see who is online and whether from the web or a phone, and an item someone is editing is locked for the others while they do.

Some things are still being worked out in the design brief — not built yet, and this page will not claim otherwise before they are.

Where things stand

See the changelog for what has actually shipped, the Privacy Policy for what the app and its backend do with your data, and the Terms for the rest, with the Explore community terms for what may be published there.