Twenty-five ranked lists for each country — attractions, cathedrals, restaurants, hill walks, festivals, markets — fifty entries in every one. The fiftieth is chosen as carefully as the first. Download a country once and it works with no signal at all.
One email when it ships — that's the whole mailing list. Or write to fiftyfold@fiskllc.com.
The shelf. Japan is free and sits first; the other nine are alphabetical, and float up as you buy them.
| 250 × | Ranked lists — twenty-five per country, fifty entries in each, from attractions and cathedrals to hill walks, breweries, markets and films |
| 12,500 × | Entries, each with its city, its full address, and a sentence that tells you something rather than selling you something |
| 10,244 × | Photographs, every one credited to its photographer with its licence named |
| 4,047 × | Cities and towns you can filter to — pick London and see all 208 of its entries across 22 of the 25 lists at once |
| 174 × | Michelin-starred restaurants, read from the current guide at build time rather than quoted from memory |
| 1 × | Trip planner that turns the lists into a day-by-day itinerary, weighted by how much there is to see in each city |
| 0 × | Accounts, subscriptions, adverts, analytics, or anything you have to sign into before you can read a list |
Guides are needed on aeroplanes, on the metro, in a country where your data plan has quietly given up. So the writing ships inside the app, and each country's photographs are a single download of 25 to 42 MB, kept permanently.
After that there is no connection required and none made. No accounts, no sign-in, no analytics, no tracking. Nothing you tap, search for or plan leaves the device.
Two filters: what and where. Everything shows all 1,250 entries for a country at once, grouped by list. Or narrow to one of the twenty-five.
Then pick a city. Everything plus London gives 208 entries across 22 lists — the museums, the pubs, the markets, the walks — which is the view a set of separate lists otherwise hides.
Type anywhere in a guide and it searches all 1,250 entries, not the list you happen to be looking at. Each result says which list it came from.
Stonehenge returns three hits — the monument in Attractions, the raising of the sarsens in Historical events, and the solstice in Seasonal wonders. You should not have to work out which of twenty-five lists a place lives in before you can look for it.
Choose your cities and how many days you have. The planner splits the days by how much there is to see in each place, then fills them — morning, lunch, afternoon, evening — drawing on the same ranked lists.
Nothing repeats, pinning one city's days re-splits the rest around it, and when a city runs out it borrows from the same region and marks it a day trip. There is an option to leave the afternoon alone, because in some countries that is the only sensible plan.
Not a trial and not a sample — the whole guide, twenty-five lists, no sign-up and no card. If it isn't useful, the other nine won't be either.
Twenty-five ranked lists. Attractions, temples, castles, gardens, ryokan, izakaya, onsen, railways, festivals, crafts — fifty entries in each, every one with its city and its full address.
The photographs are a single 35 MB download, kept permanently. After that the guide works on a plane, on the metro, and in a country where your data plan has quietly given up.
Nothing is held back and nothing expires. If Japan isn't useful, the other nine won't be either — and you'll have found that out for nothing.
Every entry was written for this guide. Nothing is pulled from a listings site, and there are no user reviews, no star averages and no sponsored placements — because the moment a guide takes money to move something up the list, the list stops meaning anything.
Michelin stars are read from the current guide each time a country is built, never quoted from memory. That is how a Shanghai three-star that had closed the previous November was caught before it shipped.
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences and are checked one at a time, because image search fails in ways you cannot predict: a search for a Cologne hotel returned a Nigerian politician, one for a German spa returned a hairdryer, and one for a London hotel returned the actor Ned Beatty.
Restaurants, cafés, bars and shops carry no photographs at all. Commons has almost nothing usable for individual venues and what it has is frequently the wrong subject. A text-only list is the honest form for those.
These are travel guides, not a booking service. Entries have not had a per-entry verification pass; places close, move and change their hours. Check before you travel. Photograph credits and licences are listed in full inside the app.
I kept ending up in the same place: a city I had a day in, a phone with no signal, and a search result that was thirty listings deep in sponsored restaurants I had no way to judge.
What I wanted was a book. Somebody's actual opinion, ranked, finite, and the same on the aeroplane as at the hotel. Fifty is enough to be useful and few enough that the last one still had to earn its place.
So the lists are ranked and they stop at fifty. Nobody paid to be on them. It downloads once and then it is yours, on the device, with nothing reporting back.
— the founder, Fisk LLC
Japan free. The other nine bought one at a time, once. No subscription, ever.
One email when it ships. That's the whole mailing list.
Fiftyfold Guides.a Fisk LLC app
