Sakin Nokta — a place finder that ranks by quiet, not popularity

The problem

When you want to find somewhere calm and uncrowded in a city, standard map apps do not answer that need — they all rank by popularity, not by quiet.

The solution

Quiet is not a signal you can measure directly — listening through the phone's microphone and buying real-time occupancy data were both outside this product's scope. Instead I built an openly declared estimate: every venue type carries its own baseline quietness score (libraries and gardens at the top, parks and museums in the middle, cafés at the bottom), with small corrections from OpenStreetMap tags layered on top.

But that baseline score alone does not decide the list. The ranking combines type weights that shift with the mood you pick (Work / Rest / Walk), how far the place is from you, crowding reports sent in by users, and "peaceful" votes. So in the same city, at the same moment, changing only your mood reorders the list — a library comes to the front under "Work" and gives way to the waterfront and the park under "Walk".

On top of that, when you open a place you see an hour-by-hour crowding estimate: this too is not a real measurement but is derived from the typical busy hours of that venue type, and it is presented in the interface as a suggestion rather than a promise.

Technology

A detail worth highlighting

When the home screen tried to draw thousands of venue cards at once, the iOS render engine collapsed entirely and the whole window — tab bar included — went white. The root cause was not navigation but rendering an unbounded list; I fixed it by paginating (batches of 40 plus a "Show more"). What I took from it: on some platforms, rendering an unbounded list does not mean "slow", it means a completely blank screen.

Screens