Wren: Places to Your Map

Someone sends you a reel. Five places you have to eat at in Rome, a rooftop bar in Lisbon, a bookshop down an alley in Tokyo. You mean to remember. By Thursday it is gone. Wren catches them — off a screenshot, out of a list another app exported, or from a guide you already keep — and puts them where you will be standing when you need them. FOUR WAYS IN Places do not only arrive as screenshots, so there are four ways to hand them over. All of them end in the same place: a guide in Apple Maps. 1. FROM A REEL OR A POST. Share it to Wren and the places are read out of it. Wren's server fetches the post, reads it and discards it — the video never reaches your phone. Paid, with 250 posts a month. 2. FROM SCREENSHOTS. One tap per place, from a reel, a post, a message from a friend, or a photographed page of a guidebook. Text recognition runs on your phone, so the screenshots stay there. Wren also reads the caption to work out which city you are looking at, and asks you to confirm it. 3. FROM A FILE. A list exported from another app — CSV, KML, KMZ, GPX, GeoJSON, or a Google Takeout export of your saved places. Where the file carries coordinates, each place is looked up near its own, so a list spanning three cities resolves correctly rather than being dragged towards one of them. 4. FROM A GUIDE YOU ALREADY HAVE. Share a guide out of Apple Maps, paste the link into Wren, and it reads the places already in it. Newly found places sit alongside them, and one guide is made holding both. THEN YOU CHECK IT Every place shows what was read beside what was matched, so a wrong match is obvious rather than confident. Anything not found — or found wrongly — can be searched again by hand. Nothing is written to Apple Maps until you say so. What comes out is not a copy of your places in another app. It is an actual guide, in the Maps you already use, on every device signed in to your Apple Account. About a hundred and fifty places fit in one guide; beyond that Wren splits them into numbered guides and tells you before it does, rather than quietly dropping the ones that would not fit. ANYWHERE, NOT JUST RESTAURANTS Restaurants and bars, certainly. Also viewpoints, markets, hotels, galleries, shops, trailheads, beaches and the odd petrol station someone insists does the best coffee for fifty miles. Anywhere with a name and a location. NO ACCOUNT, NO SIGN-IN Wren has no account and reads nothing from yours. Screenshots are read on your device and are never uploaded. Three things leave your phone, and only when you ask: the name of a place, sent to Apple Maps so it can be found, exactly as the Maps app does; a shared guide link, sent to Apple to be expanded; and the link to a reel or post you share, sent to Wren's own server, which fetches that post, reads the names out of it and discards it. Nothing about the post is kept. FREE, WITH OPTIONAL PURCHASES Guides of up to three places are free, for good, and so is reading a screenshot. Two one-time purchases: one removes the three-place cap and lets you add to a guide you already have, the other reads places out of a shared post. Buying both together costs less than buying them apart. No subscription, and everything restores on your other devices. WHAT APPLE ALLOWS, PLAINLY Apple Maps offers no way to add to an existing guide from outside the app, so combining makes a new guide holding the old places and the new ones together — Wren keeps them, so it can be made again in a tap.