Do I need an account?

No. Browsing is free and completely anonymous: open the app and the map is there — no sign-up wall, no tutorial to sit through, and no permission prompt at launch. You can browse the map, search places and suburbs, filter by tag, and open any place to see how it rates without ever signing in. An account is only needed to contribute or to keep something of your own: rating and tagging a place, saving a place to Your board, tapping “I’m here”, suggesting a place that is missing, and setting your worker type and home city. Sign-in is Google or Apple only — there is no Anywhere password to invent, and we never see one.

How do ratings and tags work?

A rating is a star score from 1 to 5 plus any of a fixed set of tags you tap — fast wifi, power outlets, quiet, lively, good coffee, and so on. There is no review box: nothing you write can end up on a place, because there is nowhere in the app to write it. One rating per place per account. Open a place you have rated and the button reads “Your rating: 4★ · Edit”, so you can change it, or remove it entirely, whenever you like. Tags are counted across everyone who rated a place and shown as the bars under “What it’s good for”, which is why a single tap is genuinely useful — most places in a new city have no community signal at all yet. Where the community has not covered a place, some of the tags you see are drawn from OpenStreetMap facts, or inferred by our server from a place’s Google reviews. Google review text is never shown in Anywhere and never stored: the server reads it, keeps a count of which tags it supports, and discards the words.

How do I add a place that is missing?

Search for it. If nothing comes back, the empty result offers “Add this place” and carries what you typed into the add screen — you can also reach it from the bottom of Your board. You search for the place by name, pick it from the results, and add it; you never type the place’s address or details yourself, so nothing gets mistyped. It goes on the map immediately — for you and for everyone else — because we look the place up with Google from the result you picked rather than taking your word for it, and a place that is not a real, workable venue never gets that far. There is no queue to wait in. Its hours, photos and category arrive from Google within a minute or so of you adding it. This works anywhere in the world. If nobody has added a place in your city yet, yours is the first, and the city starts existing on the map from that moment.

Something about a place is wrong, or it should not be listed

Open the place and use “Report this place”. You pick a reason — inappropriate name, not a workplace, permanently closed, duplicate, wrong location, or spam — and we review every report by hand; nothing you report is passed to the venue. Reporting needs you to be signed in, so that we can follow up and so the same account cannot flood the queue. Three things take a place off the map. A place that is not a real, workable venue is refused when someone tries to add it. A place already on the map is re-checked against the same rules whenever its details are re-synced, and one that no longer passes is hidden automatically, as is one Google reports as permanently closed. And anything a person reports goes to us. Places are hidden, never deleted, so a wrong call can be put right. Opening hours, phone numbers, photos and Google’s own star rating come from Google Maps Platform and are re-synced about once a month, so a place that has just changed its hours or closed may still show the old details for a while. A venue that wants its listing corrected or removed can write to us at the address at the foot of this page.

How is my location used?

Only while you are using the app, and only if you say yes. Anywhere asks once, on the last step of first-run setup, after explaining what it is for — and the system prompt only appears when you tap Continue. It is never requested the moment the app opens. Permission is “when in use” only. There is no background location in the app at all: no background entitlement, no tracking when the app is closed, and nothing about where you have been is collected in the background. Your coordinates centre the map, show how far away a place is, and order search results by distance; they are not stored on our servers. Decline in your device’s dialog and the app never asks again — the map simply centres on Sydney and everything keeps working. If you change your mind, the “near me” control takes you to your device settings, where you can also revoke the permission at any time.

How do I delete my account, and what happens to my ratings?

Account → Delete account, then “Delete permanently”. It is two taps inside the app, it happens immediately, and you never have to email anyone or fill in a web form to do it. Your profile details are cleared, and your saved board and your entire “I’m here” history are deleted outright. Your past ratings are not deleted: they are anonymised — reassigned to a generic “deleted user” — so that a place’s overall rating stays accurate for everyone else after you leave. Nothing identifying you survives that, and your ratings can no longer be traced back to you or to your Google or Apple account. If you would rather a specific rating were gone entirely, remove it from the place before you delete your account and we will remove it for you.

Where does the information about places come from?

Three sources, and nothing else. Google Maps Platform supplies the factual details — name, address, category, opening hours, phone, website, price level, photos, and Google’s own star rating and rating count — which we store in our own database and re-sync monthly rather than reading live. OpenStreetMap supplies some tags and the short accessibility note on a place: © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL), openstreetmap.org/copyright. And the community — people who actually sat down and worked somewhere — supplies the star ratings and the tags, which is the part no data provider can sell us. “Open now” is worked out from the stored opening hours and the current time in the place’s own city. A place with no hours on file is shown as unknown rather than closed.

Which cities does Anywhere cover?

You can add a place anywhere in the world, and search finds whatever people have added, wherever they added it. Coverage is not even, though, and we would rather say so: Sydney, Australia is where the map is properly full — thousands of places, imported and kept up to date. Everywhere else has what people have added so far, which in a city nobody has used yet is nothing at all. So if you open the app somewhere new, expect an empty map, and know that adding one place is what starts it. A city we see people using is a city we go and fill in properly.

Does it cost anything?

No. Anywhere is free: no subscription, no in-app purchases, and no ads anywhere in the app.

Still stuck?

Written questions go to hello@powerupdigital.agency. We are a small team, so replies are not instant, and the answers above resolve most things faster than an email would. If the app is behaving oddly, saying what you tapped just before it happened is usually enough for us to find the cause.