GuideAnywhere. Listen Local Story in Anywhere. A mobile app for travellers and history lovers
I wanted to share a side project I’ve been working on for the past few months, which was inspired by an eye-opening moment I had on a trip to Kyoto, Japan, earlier this year.
I was exploring the famous Honno-ji Temple—which is a massive historical deal over there since it’s the exact site where the legendary samurai Oda Nobunaga met his end. While walking around, I ran into an older American married couple who were just staring blankly at a beautiful monument.
We started chatting, and they told me they were absolutely fascinated by the temple and deeply wanted to learn more about its history while standing there on-site. However, because there was completely zero English introduction or signage available, they were stuck wishing they could unlock the stories behind the monuments. Translation apps weren't really helping them dive into the actual depth of the history either.
It made me realize that as independent travelers, we travel thousands of miles to see these incredible places, but we miss out on 90% of the actual lore, culture, and context because of language barriers. You either have to pay a fortune for a live human tour guide, or just take a quick picture and leave completely blind.
That inspired me to build GuideAnywhere. The goal is to give travelers a middle ground—like having a knowledgeable "local guide" in your pocket who tells you the raw history of what you're looking at, right when you're looking at it.
Here are 3 core things about the app:
- GPS-Triggered Stories: You don't have to search manually. The app uses your phone’s GPS to automatically feed you the audio stories of the exact attractions and historical spots right near you as you walk.
- Global Coverage: To make it useful anywhere you go, I've built out a database of over 100,000 attraction POIs (Points of Interest) all around the globe.
- Completely Multilingual (6 Languages): To break down that language barrier completely, the app supports English, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi.
More languages will be added in next few months.
I'm an indie dev building this solo, and I've reached the point where I really need real-world testing and fresh eyes on it.
You can check it out in
Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chunghangsze.guideanywhere&hl=en&gl=US
or
iOS:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/guideanywhere/id6762373146
I would love to get your thoughts: What feature requests do you have?
What kind of functionality would make an app like this a "must-have" for your next vacation?
Appreciate any feedback or critiques you have for me!
🤖 The Codex Co-Pilot / Dev Workflow Behind the App
Since I’m building GuideAnywhere as a solo developer, I relied heavily on Codex to act as my architectural co-pilot. Instead of wasting weeks reading syntax documentation for a multi-layered infrastructure, I used Codex to help me write the core logic and bridge my entire serverless tech stack together.
Here is exactly how Codex helped me stitch the app together:
- React Native (Mobile Side): I used Codex to co-author the location-tracking hooks. Writing clean, battery-efficient background GPS polling in React Native can be a nightmare. Codex helped me scaffold the geolocation event listeners that seamlessly calculate when a user enters a POI radius.
- Supabase (Database & API Layer): With over 100,000 global POIs, spatial queries have to be incredibly fast. I used Codex to write the Postgres functions (using PostGIS) to handle real-time geospatial proximity math. It also generated the boilerplate for my
- Supabase Edge Functions, allowing me to deploy low-latency, globally distributed TypeScript APIs that fetch local stories in milliseconds.
- Cloudflare (Media Delivery): GuideAnywhere streams a ton of audio and image data. Codex helped me write the automated asset-routing scripts to bundle, sign, and securely cache all our multilingual audio streams directly on Cloudflare’s edge network, keeping CDN costs near zero.
Basically, I spent less time debugging infrastructure and more time focusing on the user experience and multi-language logic. Would love to answer any questions about the serverless setup or the AI workflow!
