Meet ExploreStamp: turn a trip into a stamp
Many people who travel in Taiwan collect commemorative stamps. Next to a station ticket window, at a museum exit, at the door of a shop on an old street, there's often a stamp and an ink pad waiting. What makes stamping fun is that you have to actually go there.
ExploreStamp brings this onto your phone and adds what a paper stamp book can't do: photos, dates, a map, and routes planned in advance.
Start with a route
When you open the app, the first screen shows themed collections. Each route picks 6 or 7 places around one theme, for example:
- 6 Classic Taiwan Railway Stations: Neiwan, Jiji, Shengxing, Jingtong and other stations that still have their wooden station buildings
- A Walk Through Tainan: historic sites, a station and a library in Tainan, finished off with a bowl of tofu pudding
- Night Markets & Street Food: from Ay-Chung Flour-Rice Noodle to Penshui Turkey Rice
- Botanical Gardens Worth the Trip: from Erbazi Botanical Garden to the Fuyuan forest park
Every route shows your progress. If you'd rather not follow a route, you can search for a place by name. There are currently 43 places and 8 routes, and the place data updates automatically in the background.
You have to be there to get the stamp
When you arrive, tap "Check in" and the app reads your location once to confirm you're within the place's check-in range. The range depends on the type of place, from 150 meters for a food stall to 500 meters for a forest park, and the accuracy of your phone's location is taken into account so you aren't left standing at the entrance unable to check in.
Once you've checked in, the place's stamp goes into your stamp book. The frame shape shows the category — hexagons for historic sites, ticket shapes for railway stations, book shapes for libraries — and the stamp carries the place's name and the date of your first visit. Places you haven't been to yet leave a dashed outline in the stamp book.
You can visit the same place many times. There's only ever one stamp, but every visit is recorded.
Photos, calendar and postcards
When you check in, you can add up to 6 photos and a short note. These visits are saved to your calendar, where each day uses the first photo you took that day as its cover, and each month shows how many stamps you collected and how many new places you visited.
If you want to share the trip, the photo, stamp, place name and date can be combined into a portrait postcard that you send to friends or post on social media through your phone's share sheet. If you didn't take a photo, the app uses a stamp-focused layout instead.
No sign-in needed to start
ExploreStamp works without signing in. Your check-ins and photos are stored on your phone and aren't uploaded by default, and your location is read only once, when you tap check in.
For now, moving to a new phone means moving your data yourself, so the app has built-in backup export and import: it packs all your records and photos into one file that you can save to whichever cloud drive you use. Optional accounts and cloud backup are planned for the future.
Kinds of places
Places fall into 20 categories. Here are the ones Taiwan has so far, with examples:
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Museum | National Palace Museum, Chimei Museum, National Museum of Natural Science |
| Art Museum | Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Pier-2 Art Center |
| Heritage Site | Chihkan Tower, Fort San Domingo, Anping Fort |
| Place of Worship | Lukang Longshan Temple |
| Library | Taipei Public Library Beitou Branch, National Central Library |
| Railway Station | Neiwan Station, Jiji Station, Jingtong Station |
| Factory Tour | Kavalan Whisky Distillery, Jiu Zhen Nan Pastry Museum |
| Night Market | Fengjia Night Market, Liuhe Night Market |
| Food | Tong Ji Anping Tofu Pudding, Gongzheng Baozi |
| Nature | Taipei Botanical Garden, Aowanda National Forest Recreation Area |
The other categories are zoos and aquariums, theme parks, landmarks and viewpoints, performance and sports venues, bookstores, university campuses, shopping, markets, cafés and airports, which are being added country by country.
See the themed routes under Explore.
No need to wait for a long holiday
Collecting stamps doesn't have to mean a big trip. If you live in Taipei, you can visit the Beitou library or Bopiliao on a weekend; in Tainan, you can cover most of "A Walk Through Tainan" in an afternoon. Turn on place suggestion reminders in the app's settings, and it will suggest somewhere you haven't been yet at a time you choose.
To hear about new places and routes, subscribe to the newsletter or join the Facebook group.