Neighborhood Cat Map: See Which Cats Live Around You
There is a grey tabby that sits in a second-floor window two streets from my flat, every evening, watching people walk home. I have never met its owner. I do not know its name. For about a year that bothered me more than it should have, and it is the reason Cat Map exists: a neighborhood cat map where the pins are real house cats, put there by the people who live with them, and where I could finally find out that the window cat is called Dubu.
▶ Get it on Google Play (free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thefacegood.eutcat
A neighborhood cat map instead of a feed
Most cat communities are feeds. A photo goes up, gets its hour of attention, and is buried by lunchtime. I wanted the opposite: a map, where a cat stays attached to its neighborhood. Open the app and you see round pins with cat faces scattered on a map of your area. Tap one and the cat's card opens with its photos, name, a one-line intro, the neighborhood and the breed. Come back a month later and the same cat is still there, on the same corner.
If your own street is quiet, drag the map. Neighborhood cats a few districts over, cats in a city you visited once, cats across the whole map. If you have ever searched for a cats near me app and only found adoption listings, this is a different kind of thing: it is just local cats, and people who want to show off the one they live with.
When a cat makes you smile, you send hearts. That is the entire social mechanic. There are no comments to moderate and no follower counts, just a little heart tally on each cat, and it turns out that is enough to make people take better photos.
Putting your own cat on the map
Adding your cat takes about half a minute. Tap your neighborhood on the map, choose a few photos, write a name and a line about them, done. A pin with your cat's face appears, and the hearts start arriving from people you will never meet. If you were looking for an app to share photos of my cat without building a whole profile, this is deliberately that small.
No cat of your own? You are still welcome. A good share of the people browsing are what Koreans call online cat parents: people who cannot keep a cat where they live and get their fix by looking at everyone else's. Nobody is asked to post anything.
One honest note: the app started in Korea, so today the map is densest there. Pins appear wherever people add them, and the map is global, but if you open it in a city with no cats yet, you would be the first, which I think is a fine thing to be.
The part I spent the longest on: not revealing where you live
A photo of a pet with a location attached is, functionally, a photo of where you live. That kept me from shipping for a while. The fix is simple and a little crude: a pin is never placed at the spot you registered. The app moves it a few hundred metres away in a random direction, so the pin tells the neighborhood and nothing more precise. The card shows the neighborhood name, not an address, and the offset is different for every cat, so you cannot work backwards from a cluster.
For the same reason, the app is for house cats only. It is not a stray-cat map and you cannot register one; I did not want to build a targeting tool for the wrong kind of person. Every card has report and block, and blocked users disappear from your map. I would rather have fewer features and a map that people trust with their own animal.
Who this is for
- Anyone who wonders where do cats live in my neighborhood and would like names to go with the faces
- Cat owners who want their cat adored by strangers without running a social media account
- People who cannot keep a cat and still want a daily dose of local cats
- Travellers who like to check what the cats look like in the next town
It is free to install, to post and to browse. There is no account to create.
Download (Google Play, free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thefacegood.eutcat
※ Pins are shown at neighborhood level only, never at an exact address. The app is for cats you keep, not for reporting strays.
If you add the first cat in your area, tell me which city. I keep a list, and it is my favourite thing about running this.
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