Afterdark
SwiftUI · SwiftData · Foundation Models
Afterdark is an iOS app for finding the haunted places around you. Browse over ten thousand haunted locations across the United States, get a notification when you drive past one, plan a road trip through the spookiest stops nearby, and hear each location's story told back to you by an on-device AI.
Features
Haunted Map
Every haunted location on one map, with photo pins that cluster and shrink as you zoom out.
Haunted Notifications
A heads-up when you come within a mile of a haunted location, even with the app closed.
Haunted Road Trips
Pick up to ten stops and Afterdark orders them into the shortest drive, with driving directions between each.
Echoes
A short horror story inspired by a location's lore, written on device in one of four voices: Explorer, Campfire, Lost Journal or Case File.
Visits
Check in when you're actually at a location to build your visit history.
Leaderboards
Compete with the community on most visits and most locations added.
Community Stories
Comment with your own experiences, and see what's trending across the app.
Add Locations
Submit a haunted location with a photo, and it joins the map once it's reviewed.
Saved Locations
Bookmark the places you want to visit next.
Afterdark+
A monthly, yearly or lifetime upgrade that unlocks every location, notifications, road trips and Echoes.
Location Data
Locations live in a remote backend and are mirrored on device with SwiftData, so search, Near You and the map all read from a local store and keep working offline. The first launch pages through the whole table by id, and every launch after that only fetches rows edited or deleted since the last sync. The sync watermark is taken from the newest row actually read rather than the device clock, so clock skew can never skip a change.
Haunted Notifications
iOS only lets an app watch twenty regions at a time, so Afterdark uses CLMonitor to geofence the twenty closest locations the user hasn't been notified about, and re-picks them as the user moves. When the user crosses into one, iOS relaunches the app in the background to send the notification. Each location only notifies once, with a cooldown between alerts, and the notified list syncs with the remote backend so a reinstall doesn't repeat them.
Road Trips
Stops are ordered without any network requests: a nearest neighbor pass builds a route from straight-line distances, then 2-opt reverses any stretch where the route doubles back on itself. Driving directions for each leg are then requested from MapKit together, and a leg that fails falls back to a straight line so the rest of the trip still shows.
Echoes
Echoes use Apple's Foundation Models framework to write stories entirely on device, with no server and no cost per story. The model generates into a @Generable type with guided fields for the title and story, and the text streams in as it's written. Each narrative voice has its own instructions, so the same location reads differently as a campfire tale or a case file.