I have a bad habit of saving places and never going to them.
Not because I don’t want to. Because by the time I’m nearby, I’ve completely forgotten the place exists. A restaurant I bookmarked six months ago, a bookshop someone recommended, a little square I walked past once and told myself I’d come back to. Gone. Walked right past them.
I looked for an app that would fix this. Something simple: save a place, get notified when you’re close. What I found were either overly complex, tied to Google accounts, or just unreliable about the notifications. Nothing quite did what I wanted. So I built Qarib, used it myself for quite some time, and eventually got it to a state worth sharing.
What it actually does
Qarib is a “want to visit” list with geofence notifications. That’s the core of it.
- Save places manually or by searching
- Get notified when you enter the radius of a saved place; so you actually go
- Sync your places to Nextcloud via WebDAV, so your list survives phone changes
- Directions handed off to whichever maps app you already use
- No Google Maps API key required; built on OpenStreetMap
The data lives on your phone and, if you want, on your own Nextcloud. Nothing in between.
A note on place names and territories
Qarib does not decide how places, countries, or territories are named. It displays the address and details as returned by the data source it queries; OpenStreetMap and related services. Any naming of disputed or occupied territories reflects those upstream sources, not a position taken by the app or myself.
Built with AI, openly
Like all my apps, Qarib was built with AI assistance. I don’t hide that. The ideas, the decisions, the direction; those are mine. The AI helps me build faster than I could alone. Worth being upfront about.
Part of a larger suite
Qarib is the latest addition to a growing collection of Android apps I’m building for the self-hosted community. Nóta (notes), Merk (bookmarks), Blik (screenshots), and Vinci (personal CRM) are already live. They all share the same design language and the same principles: free, open source, privacy-respecting, and built for people who run their own infrastructure.
Qarib works without Nextcloud too; if you just want a local list with geofence notifications, it does that. Nextcloud sync becomes useful the moment you switch phones and want your places to follow you.
The source code is on GitHub, the app is free, and donations are always appreciated.
