Cryptid Coordinates is a platform to explore haunted locations across the united states. A gateway into uncovering paranormal activity near and far.

Overview of features: Discover Haunted Locations: Browse a list of over ten thousand haunted spots across the U.S., each with detailed information and spine-chilling stories told by other users. Visit & Compete: Track the locations you've visited and climb the leaderboard. Challenge your friends and see who can visit the most haunted sites. Explore Nearby: Find haunted locations near you with the app's location-based search and share your ghost hunting experience. Interactive Map: View and navigate to haunted places with an easy-to-use map interface, allowing your exploration to be visual. Request a location: Know of spot not in our system? File a request to broaden the ecosystem.

In order to greatly optimize performance of this app, I used SwiftData for location querying. On the the users first load of the app, locations objects are decoded from a JSON file and then converted to SwiftData models and inserted into the model context. This allows lightning fast querying of locations, great for location based searches, text searches, etc.

MapKit is a great framework that offers an immersive way to browse haunted locations as map markers around users real time location. There is a high volume of locations on the map so I used ClusterMap as a package dependecy to improve performace of rendering markers on the map. Another way of optimizing the map was to compute a geohash, which is essentially a geographical box where the coordinates lies and you can control the degree of that hash. Geohashes were used as a basis for clustering and reloading the annotations when the camera moved.

In order to maintain my user base, I am using Apple ID to authenticate users through Firebase Auth. This simplified onboarding for users, as the app is exclusive to iOS.