Why littledots exists

Hi, I'm Wolfi.

I've been building and running web services for more than twenty years. Servers, databases, the things that keep a website up while everyone else is asleep. That's the day job.

The rest of the time, I travel. My wife and I have been exploring the world together ever since we met, often with family along too. A long weekend away, a road trip that goes on for days, a flight to the other side of the planet: we love all of it. A heartfelt thank you, my dear, for every single one of those trips.

And that brings me to littledots, where the developer and the traveler in me finally teamed up.

Two months, once around the world

In spring 2023 we spent two months traveling around the world.

It was one of the best things we've ever done. It also left us with photos scattered across two phones, a stack of loose paper doing its best impression of an itinerary, and friends and family back home curious where we were right now, and what we were seeing.

We wanted one place for all of it. Somewhere to organize everything and plan ahead, so the next itinerary wouldn't live on loose paper. Somewhere to collect the memories while they were still fresh. Somewhere we could both add our photos without sending them back and forth. And somewhere to show the people at home a bit of the trip, without handing the whole thing over to a social network.

That was the idea. It sat in the back of my head for a while.

Our memories are ours

I'm also big on running my own things. A lot of the services I use every day are hosted by me, under rules I set.

And travel memories are about as personal as data gets. Where you were, who you were with, photos of the people you love most.

Most apps that could have held all of that come from a handful of very large companies. Big tech has a habit of treating whatever you hand it as raw material: to train its AI, to build a profile of you, to sell ads against.

I didn't want our memories eaten up like that.

So in September 2024 I started building littledots. An app to plan your trips, collect the photos, publish the parts you want to share, and relive the whole adventure whenever you like.

What mattered most

Above everything else, I wanted littledots to be private until you decide otherwise.

When you add a trip, nobody sees it but you. Same with your map and your photos. If you want to show a trip to someone, you invite them, or you switch on your travel journal and decide trip by trip who gets to look. Nothing ends up public because you forgot to untick a box.

I don't sell what you put in here. There are no ads, and nothing in the app keeps an eye on what you do. Nobody gets to train an AI on your trips, your photos or your notes either.

When you delete something, it actually gets deleted. A photo you remove is gone from storage, not quietly moved somewhere you have no control over. Close your account and your trips, places, photos and files go with it. The only thing I keep is your username, so nobody can grab it later and pretend to be you.

The boring paperwork gets a bit of extra care. Boarding passes, hotel bookings, scans: each one is encrypted with its own key, and stored where there's no public link to it.

An alternative to big tech

littledots runs on servers in the EU.

People from anywhere are welcome, and honestly, the more corners of the map, the better. But I wanted littledots to stand on its own feet, without leaning on US big tech for the software or the servers underneath.

I'll be upfront, it's not a hundred percent. Some of the handiest features lean on outside services, and a lot of those come from big tech. In the app they're called Magic helpers: finding a hotel, a restaurant or a museum on Google and pulling in its address and details with one tap, or filling in a flight's times from its number. They really do make putting a trip together quicker.

They're also all off by default. Until you switch one on in Settings, none of your trip details get sent their way. Leave them off and you can still plan every trip, it's just a bit more typing.

The rest works the same way. Signing in with Google or Apple is a choice, and so are push notifications. And there's a screen in Settings listing every outside service the app talks to, so you can always see what's going on.

If you'd rather stay clear of the big app stores too, littledots works in your browser, and on Android you can get it from our own F-Droid repository.

For us, and hopefully for you

I built littledots for us, and we use it for every trip we take. If it stayed just that, I'd be happy.

But I'd love for it to grow into a small community of people who travel the way we do, and feel the same way about their memories. So right from the start, I built it for a lot more than two people.

If you've been looking for somewhere to plan, keep and share your trips without handing them to big tech, among people who get it, you're very welcome here.

It's still just me building it, and it grows one traveler at a time. Everyone who joins is welcomed in by a guide, someone who's already here. Right now, that someone is me. Every single time. And together, all our trips light up one shared map.

Still on the fence?

Totally fair. Here's where I'd look next.

If you want to know what we think travel is really about, read Life is not a journey.

You might also be wondering about AI. For its whole first year, I wrote littledots by hand, without any AI tools. Since then, AI coding assistants have become an everyday part of the job for a lot of developers, and I use them too. The ideas, the decisions and the final say on every change are still mine. What the tools give me is time, so more gets done, and done better, in the same hours.

Where AI shows up in the app itself, and how to keep it out, is all in our take on AI.

And if you'd like every last detail about what happens to your data, it's all in the privacy policy.