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Apps that tell you when friends are in the same city (2026)

Searching for this gets you store listings and one blog post by a company selling its own answer. So here is the whole category on one screen: sixteen rows, fifteen of them somebody else's app, every cell checked on 6 September 2026 against Apple's public lookup API, the Google Play listings and the product sites themselves. All sixteen install free. Exactly one of them, dipity!, charges for anything afterwards, and it sells a sleep feature that has nothing to do with meeting friends. The largest install base I could verify anywhere in this field is 5,000 Android downloads.

TripSynq and Crosspath run in a browser, which means nobody has to install anything and nobody has to be talked onto a store page. Pangea is the biggest and the most social of them. LetsOverlap reads your phone calendar. My own app is the one that never receives a location, in the background or otherwise, which is the entire reason I built it instead of using one of the other fifteen. The rest are tiny, iOS-only, dormant, or trackers wearing a travel label.

The near miss that fifteen apps were built for

r/digitalnomad, 23 December 2024: "curious how you all stay connected with friends, or find out who's in your city besides Instagram or current social media... Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already." Three apps came back as answers in that thread: Overlap, Pangea and Mozi. Eleven months later, Pangea owned Overlap. Mozi gets no row below, because I have no store data on it.

Then r/AppIdeas, 2 August 2023, where somebody described this app from scratch and the top reply was one line: "Something like this: https://www.overlap-app.com/ ?" Open that URL today and a bot check hands you a 406.

Three different things are called Overlap

Search for the Overlap app and three separate products answer to the name, and nothing on the web sorts them apart for you.

Overlap, Travel Together is the one Pangea acquired. Travel Massive carried the announcement on 24 November 2025, founder Sharon Rosenberg joined Pangea as Head of Design, and the post talks about 250 or more niche travel products ripe for integration. The iOS listing, id1617541108, returns zero results in all twelve storefronts I queried. On Android it is still standing at 5,000 plus downloads, last updated 25 November 2025, one day after the announcement and not once since. Pangea's own FAQ page for Overlap users 404s. Delisted on iOS, then. Nobody has published a shutdown notice, so I am not calling it shut down.

LetsOverlap at letsoverlap.app belongs to a different developer, League Of Veterans LLC, and it is alive: version 1.1.7 shipped on 28 August 2026, 11 ratings at 4.6, and it will read trips out of your calendar instead of making you type them. Different bundle ID, different company. Whether the name is a coincidence I have no idea, and I will not guess.

getoverlap.app is the marketing site for the first one. It still links to the dead iOS listing.

Every app in the category, compared

Which ones take a location permission

ANEAR, dipity, Same City, Lazyfriends and Space/Time all take a location permission, and sparrow takes a coarse one. A sensor can tell you a friend is four streets away tonight, and that is all it can tell you, because a GPS chip has no idea what happens in March.

TripSynq, Crosspath and mine never read the sensor. They compare a city and two dates somebody typed in. LetsOverlap and Overlap read the trips already sitting in your calendar, and Globerot says it does the same. None of these helps you tonight. They hand you two weeks of notice instead, which is closer to why people go searching for this in the first place.

ANEAR's store description promises no exact location and no permanent tracking. Its App Store privacy card lists Precise Location, Contact Info, Contacts and User Content, all collected and linked to you. No app in the table has a wider gap between the pitch and the paperwork. dipity is at least blunt about it, and its own listing says your visit history runs in the background, quietly logging everywhere you go. Apple makes a developer fill that card in and nobody audits the marketing copy, so the ANEAR row above follows the card.

And the objection that has not aged a day, from r/socialskills, 16 March 2018: "no one wants to share their location nor what they are doing at any given time."

What is dead, dormant, or never shipped

Two of these are gone from the App Store. Overlap you know about. Heer is the other. id1577023079 returns zero results in every storefront I checked, the Android listing sits at 100 plus downloads and has not moved since 7 October 2025, and joinheer.com still says "Available on iOS and Android" over a description that opens "Heer is a first anti-social mobile app."

Space/Time shipped its last iOS build on 12 January 2025 and its last Android build eight days before that. Twenty months. The developer's domain, worldbrain.io, now redirects to memex.garden, an unrelated product, so I would treat this one as finished.

Globerot has a marketing site, a 2026 copyright line and no app. The pitch is automatic calendar-based trip detection. Its Download on the App Store button carries an href of "#", searching the App Store for Globerot returns nothing at all, and the apex domain answers with a 522.

Lazyfriends last shipped in March 2025. CitySync ships, but its website does not exist in any useful sense: version 99 landed on 17 March 2026, while citysync.app is a two-kilobyte blank page with a title tag and nothing behind it, and the entire store description is one sentence. Four ratings, all five stars.

Pangea has 74 ratings and is buying its rivals

Pangea has been on the App Store since 28 March 2022 and ships regularly, most recently v0.8.23 on 10 August 2026. It carries 74 ratings at 4.89, plus more than 5,000 Android downloads. On ratings, nothing else is close. The download count is matched only by Overlap's frozen listing. Its FAQ says it is 100 percent free to use, with no hidden costs and no locked features, and the store listings show no in-app purchases and no ads. The description names AI directly, combining AI, social travel, recommendations and trip planning. In November it bought Overlap, and its homepage currently runs a banner about acquiring Flaire's IP portfolio, valued on that banner at over $6 million, to accelerate AI-native travel discovery.

The acquisitions are real. It has a community around it as well, and how big that community is, plus whatever funding sits behind it, I could not verify, because every trade-press page carrying those numbers returned a 403 to me. So the circulating figures stay off this page.

TripSynq vs Overlap, since that is what people type

In 2026, barely a comparison. TripSynq is a live web app that says it is completely free with no credit card required, works from typed destinations and dates, and adds friends by email address. There is no App Store or Play link anywhere on its site, because there is no native app to link to. Overlap is an acquired product whose iOS listing is gone and whose Android build has not moved since November 2025.

In 2024 you had to think about it. The comparison that still matters is TripSynq against Crosspath, and Crosspath makes the argument for you on its own homepage: it opens by saying Overlap was acquired and folded into Pangea, and offers itself as the independent alternative. It claims 50 or more travellers across 15 or more cities, which is the vendor's own number and nobody else's.

Which one to install

An all-iPhone group where nobody will ever type a trip in by hand should take LetsOverlap. Calendar import is the one live feature in this table that does not depend on somebody remembering to add a trip, since TripSynq, Crosspath and mine all wait for you to open them and type one in.

If the sticking point is the install itself, TripSynq or Crosspath. No download, no card.

Pangea is the pick if you want a whole social product around travel, with recommendations and other people in it, though I would go in expecting a permission conversation, because I could not verify what it collects.

One Android in the group, which is most groups, cuts the native field to four: Pangea, ANEAR, Same City and mine. TripSynq and Crosspath also count, because a web page does not care which phone opened it. Overlap and Heer run there. Nobody has touched either build since last year, so I would not start a habit on one.

Wanting to know where a friend is standing right now puts you in the wrong category altogether. You want a live-location app, and I went through those separately in the ones that do not track you continuously.

What I built, and who it is wrong for

Will U Be There is the last row. You add a trip as a city and two dates, your friends do the same, and when two trips land within 100 km of each other on overlapping dates both phones get a notification. Home cities count too, so a friend who lives in the city you booked matches you, as long as they are not away that week. Miss somebody by three days and it says so.

It never receives your location. Not in the background, not with the app open, and there is no GPS permission at any point. The only geography in the database is the name of the city you typed and that city's coordinates. Your calendar cannot point at you on a map. Neither can this. A friend who matches you sees the overlap and nothing else, that city and those dates, while the rest of the list stays private. If you want a moving dot, half this page does that better.

For friends who are not on it, the group link is all I have. One link for the ski week or the conference, up to 200 people, no friend requests inside it, and anyone who joins and adds a trip starts matching. It is still an install. The r/digitalnomad reply from that December 2024 thread applies to me exactly as much as to Overlap: "It all depends on how many people you know actively use the app of course".

Every trip also pulls concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying, inside your dates, from tourist boards, city open-data portals, opera houses and ticketing sites picked by hand. Over 200,000 upcoming events, 57 countries, more than 360 named sources as of this morning. Coverage is uneven and I will not pretend otherwise. Some cities are dense, plenty of mid-sized ones are thin, and a good share of what is listed is free entry. ANEAR and sparrow ship event features as well, so I am not alone in that, though neither of them runs a curated multi-country source pipeline behind it.

It is on iPhone and Android, free, no ads, no ad SDK, 17 languages, made by one person in Amsterdam. Sign-in is Apple, Google, or a six-digit email code that expires in 15 minutes. Data sits in the EU. The in-app export gives you a JSON file with every trip, friend and group in it, and the full accounting of what the database can and cannot know is on the privacy page. It plans no trips, takes no bookings, and it will never introduce you to a stranger. App Store and Google Play, or willubethere.app.

What the whole table does not fix

Nothing in it has network effects yet, and my guess is that most of these listings will look like Space/Time's by 2028. Whichever one you pick, the value sits entirely in the six or eight people you talk into it, which is why I keep writing about what actually gets friends to install a second app rather than more feature lists. Pangea may well consolidate the rest. If it does, somebody should sit down and read what the surviving app collects, line by line. Its FAQ answers the price question in one line and says nothing about that.