We released Pin Traveler all the way back in 2018 when both Mehmet Can and I were in College. For the last 7 years now, we've been making consistent upgrades to the app engine and UI, adding new features, and improving Pin Traveler every month. But in this time, we've only had 2 major updates to the app. And today, we're releasing the third and biggest overhaul of Pin Traveler. Pin Traveler V4, built for iOS 26 & Liquid Glass.

A Brief Overview

If you don't want to stick with us until the end of the blog, here's the sparknotes version of this update:

• 🎨 Brand New Colors & Full-screen Design: Every screen has been redesigned with our new light&dark color scheme, and optimized for an edge-to-edge experience. The Map is especially gorgeous.

• 📲 Redesigned iPad experience: Pin Traveler now natively supports iPadOS, leading to great native experiences on the big screen. This also greatly improves MacOS usability.

• 🧑 New Profile Tab: The third tab is now your "profile" where you'll find a variety of shareable visualizations of your travels. This is also how you'll access your settings.

• 🏠 New Home Page: Built with a bigger and better interactive country map, and a new "My Location" widget

• 🗺️ New Map: The map is redesigned for iOS26, and now contains the list as an overlay.

• ⏸️ New Tab Bar: We're moving to Apple's native TabBar, the Pin Add page is now a tab like every other.

• 🧠 AI-Powered Features: Itinerary suggestions in the discover page, built with Apple Intelligence

Brand New Colors & Full-Screen Design

Pin Traveler has been gray-on-white, or gray-on-black for dark mode since the day we launched. We're finally bringing some color to the game with a more pleasing (in my humble opinion) light blue and dark blue color scheme. We also have a more consistent style and more granular shades of color.

Another big update is edge-to-edge screens. Every screen we have now extends behidn the notification bar and the home bar, allowing you to look at your maps at the full potential of your screen. This results in especially pleasing full-screen maps on larger iPhones and iPads.

First-world iPad Support

This ties us nicely into our next big thing: iPad support. For most apps, iPad is often an afterthought, and this used to be the case for us as well. This time around, we designed a new experience specifically for iPad. You'll see different elements take different shapes (the homepage country map for example) on iPad vs. iPhone, and a lot more sidebars. The app also resizes seamlessly as you move it around or resize it in the new windowed iPad app world of iPadOS26.

Brand New Profile Tab

We merged the list-view that used to be in the third tab with the map tab. Instead, the third tab over now houses your Profile. This is where you'll find a lot of exciting and new ways of visualizing your travels. Pin Traveler is all about visualizations, and we think it's about time we dedicated a proper space for all the map modes and shareable graphics we have.

All the cards here have many different modes and a few customizations and easter eggs, so tap around! This page is also how you get to your settings now. The profile card at the top will take you to our newly redesigned settings tab where you can change your account information, leave us feedback, or find our privacy policy.

New Home Page & Widgets

The Home page is probably the least-changed tab, but this is was a complete re-write for us! You'll see a new map widget that is much less buggy and plays nicers with large screens.

We also added a brand new "My Location" widget in the Home Page that should automatically detect where you are and allow you to pin, or add details to an existing pin.

AI Features

Apple announced a lot of very promising on-device AI features this year, and we've made our first integration with Itinerary suggestions. You can check these out from the Discover City page for some inspiration on where to go during your next trip.

We have a lot more ideas here, so watch this space!

And that's a wrap

That's all from our biggest update yet. There's a lot more going on, but we'll leave that up to you to discover. This is as close to a complete rewrite of the app we've gotten in our 7 year existence, so let us know what you think! You can reach out to us via email hello@pintraveler.net or on Instagram @pintravelerapp