MovieMap hit number 3 on the App Store's Entertainment Top Charts (Free), above HBO Max and Disney Plus, below only TikTok and Netflix. That happened for an app I co-developed and designed with Boris Vitlic, a cinematic guide to Zagreb built on Swift, MapKit, and GIS.
The brief
Zagreb has a real film history, streets and buildings that show up in movies most people walking past have no idea about. The brief, which Boris and I set for ourselves, was to turn that into something you could actually use standing on the spot, not a website you read at home. That meant real location technology, not a list with photos, and it meant the guided tours had to feel like a tour, paced and narrated, not a pin on a map with a caption.
What I built
MovieMap is a native iOS app built in Swift, using MapKit for the mapping layer and GIS data underneath to place film locations accurately across the city. Boris and I split the build between us, co-developing the app together while I also carried the design side, since the two had to move in lockstep, a map-first app lives or dies on how the map actually feels to use.
The core feature is the interactive virtual guided tour: routes through Zagreb built around its film history, meant to be followed in real time as you walk, with the app tracking where you are relative to the next stop rather than just dropping a static list of coordinates. Getting that to feel smooth, accurate positioning, sensible zoom behavior, tour pacing that doesn't rush or stall, was most of the real engineering work, the unglamorous GIS plumbing underneath a simple-looking map.
The tagline we landed on, "a cinematic guide to Zagreb," had to be true of the product, not just the pitch, so every design decision favored clarity on the map over decoration around it.
The result
MovieMap reached number 3 on the App Store's Entertainment Top Charts (Free) in its category, ahead of HBO Max and Disney Plus, behind only TikTok and Netflix. For a two-person, independently built app about a single city's film history to sit in that company, even briefly, is the clearest proof I have that the tour actually works the way we designed it to: people opened it, used it, and told the App Store's ranking algorithm as much.