Third Places
A map-first community app for discovering and sharing third places: the cafes, parks, lounges, and late-night rooms where people actually gather.
Home is the first place. Work is the second. Third places are the cafes, parks, lounges, and late-night rooms where community actually forms, and where most maps still treat every pin the same.
Third Places is a map-first mobile app for discovering and sharing those spots. People contribute places, tag how they are used, filter by lens, and save the ones worth returning to. The demos below are a frozen slice of the product, built to feel like the real surface.
Map and list
Discovery starts on a dual surface. Map for where things are. List for scanning. The same categories, search, and saves live on both. Tap a marker for a callout. Switch to list when you want density. Filter when you only care about food, or only outdoors.
The preview below is interactive. Toggle Map and List, filter categories, search, like, and save. Saved places show up on the profile tab badge.
third placesWhy it exists
Local discovery is either generic or closed. Rating platforms optimize for popularity. Friend group chats optimize for people who already know. The interesting third places near campus live in memory: a lawn people actually picnic on, a lounge that hosts deep work, a patio that becomes a neighborhood living room after nine.
I wanted a shared layer for that knowledge: community-contributed, categorized by how people use the space, and oriented around a map you can walk with. Not another review dump. A living atlas of places worth showing up to.
Five lenses
Categories are not tags for SEO. They are lenses. Food means long tables and coffee that outlasts the meeting. Outdoors means places without a roof where people still linger. Workspace means focus without isolation. Nightlife means after the day ends. Discover is for the hard-to-label gems.
Color carries the language through map markers, list accents, and callouts so the system stays readable at a glance.
Food · 4 places
Cafes, bakeries, and long tables where conversation outlasts the meal.
- CoHo Commons
- Philz Coffee
- Coupa Cafe Green Library
Contribute a place
The map only gets better when people pin what they care about. Contribution is a short flow: find a place, choose a category, leave a note that helps the next person decide to show up.
The original product used Google Places for search and Supabase for persistence. This demo runs entirely on sample data so you can feel the interaction without API keys.
Add a third place
Search the neighborhood, then tag how people actually use it.
Save for later
Liking is a pulse. Saving is a promise to return. The profile is a personal shelf of third places, with optional notes for the ones that matter in a specific way. In the discover demo above, bookmark a few places and watch the profile tab count move.
How it's built
React Native and Expo for a single iOS and Android codebase. Supabase for the places database and realtime sync. Google Maps and Places for geolocation and contribution search. Redux Toolkit for saved state. Semantic search was prototyped with embeddings so a messy query could still find the right corner of campus.
- React Native
- Expo
- Supabase
- Google Maps
- Redux
Third Places is a bet that community knowledge belongs on a map, not only in a chat thread. The portfolio demos capture the product surface; the Expo app is next to revive for a runnable build.