Places V1.2 is here!

New widgets for your Home Screen

This update brings new customizable widgets, so you can see your latest places and highlights right on your homescreen. We’ve optimized the design to be compatible with dark mode, clear mode, and fully adjustable sizing.

For members on iOS27, we’ve added a new extra large Today widget that shows the entire day’s timeline.

See how to set up your widgets.

A smarter, more reliable chat

The chat in the Search tab got a big round of work this release, so it works more reliably for more types of tasks. When a question needs a few steps, it can now use multiple tools or search different parts of your history until it has a more accurate answer.

Searching for places in history is a lot more flexible. Accent marks and alternate spellings now get picked up better, so Zurich, Zürich and Zuerich can all find the same city.

You can also identify new places directly from the chat.

New travel types

In V1.2, we’re introducing many new custom travel types to accurately capture your entire life and all the different travel types someone could use—especially more rare and special ones.

Now you can track when you are working on a farm with your tractor or ATV, capture a special journey with camel or elephant or dog sled, sail across the seas in a sailboat, or even jump out of a plane with skydiving.

A few more new additions:

• Around town: bullet train, tuk-tuk, scooter and e-bike
• On the water: kayak, jet ski, ferry and houseboat
• In the air: helicopter, paragliding and hot air balloon
• In the snow: skiing, snowmobile and snowshoes
• Off the road: horse, dirt bike and dune buggy

These types are not automatically detected (yet) but you can manually tag them. Tap any trip to change its type or open its map, and set a default travel type for the trips Places isn’t sure about.

You can access the new types from your travel page. The button at the bottom will show more options.

Smoother train and subway lines

For cars and driving, the routes were usually already really good. You can see the sky almost all the time, and the GPS signal is stronger. Other types of travel are much harder. On a train, and especially in the subway, the location quality is more limited, and false positives and jumps make it harder to draw the same clean line.

So now, with AI, we’ve built new algorithms and systems to optimize these routes. Train and subway lines used to end in a messy tangle around the station. Now they pull cleanly into the platform and follow the route you actually rode.

Walks and runs stay exactly as you recorded them, and your saved trips never change. The cleanup happens when the map is drawn, so your older train rides in Places look better too, as soon as you update.

If you’re curious how it works, we wrote up the whole story.

Updated icons for your places

Every place category now uses one consistent icon everywhere in the app, with new ones for gyms, malls and hundreds of common places. Place and visit pages show a large 3D illustration of the category.

New map styles

The full-screen map has a new style picker, the globe button, with a small hand-drawn preview of each style. There are new trail and terrain maps optimized for mountains, with contour lines and elevation shading. The 3D city styles highlight real buildings and architecture, and tilt and zoom in when you pick them. Plus a few more fun and stylized options, like Blueprint, and Sketch, which draws your streets in pencil on paper.

• Flat: Dark, Ink, Mono and Daylight
• 3D city: Dusk, Midnight and Dawn
• Earth: Satellite, Terrain, Relief and Trails
• Creative: Blueprint, Wild, Parchment and Sketch

Your preferences are now saved, so you can build your life map the way you want it. The map remembers the last style you picked, and your share images use it too. Dark stays free for everyone, and the other styles are part of Places Unlimited.

Updated names for cities and regions

Cities get renamed, regions merge, and countries adopt new official names, but the address saved with a place is often years old. We brought the city, region and country names of every place saved in Places up to date: Distrito Federal to Ciudad de México, Nur-Sultan to Astana, Orissa to Odisha, Swaziland to Eswatini, Macedonia to North Macedonia, France’s 2016 regions and more. These were automatically updated, so you don’t need to do anything and should see the correct spellings in your passport automatically.

Also new in this update

• More customization over tracking settings: between Battery or Accuracy optimized. Battery-optimized setting uses even less GPS or resources, while accuracy-focused is now a bit more aggressive to catch shorter stops.
• Tracking follows how you’re moving, and automatically switches to a lighter schedule when your battery runs lower or Low Power Mode is on. This means that for maximum detail you should keep your phone charged. The app will intentionally reduce background tracking and avoid checking GPS when battery is low.
• More settings to curate your custom places, including customizations for the exact city a place is in (especially if it is right at the border).
• You can customize units from miles or kilometers in settings
• Fitness now shows your workouts by type, with strength training differentiated from dozens of other types
• Improvements for golf detection and time in nature, which have larger place sizes
• Your timeline refreshes the last few days when you open the app, so your latest info shows up more quickly without needing to do a pull-to-refresh. You can still always pull-to-refresh to reload.
• More options on the Recalculate view to adjust a day’s tracking
• Many other bug fixes and improvements