Most people open Kulu with a simple question in mind: what’s near me? The map is how you answer it, so the map has to be the best part of the app. Until now it wasn’t, and the reason is that we were using the map built into your phone.
Those built-in maps are fine for a handful of locations. Kulu has around 20,000 restaurant pins, and at that size things started to fall apart. Zoom out over a city and you’d get a wall of pins stacked on top of each other, hiding the very places you were trying to find. Pan across the map and it would stutter. And because iOS and Android each hand you a different map, the app didn’t look or behave quite the same depending on the phone in your hand.
So we rebuilt it on MapLibre, an open-source mapping engine that we control end to end.
Fewer pins, more answers
The biggest change you’ll notice is clustering. Instead of dumping every pin on the screen at once, nearby restaurants now collapse into a single circle with a count on it. Zoom out over Seattle and you see a handful of clusters instead of a thousand overlapping markers. Zoom in and they split apart, again and again, until you’re looking at individual restaurants on individual streets.
It sounds like a small thing, but it changes how the map reads. A cluster tells you at a glance where the density is, which neighborhoods have options and which don’t. And when you get close enough to actually pick somewhere to eat, the clutter is gone and the pins you’re left with are the ones that matter.
And it’s fast
The new map is drawn by your phone’s graphics chip, the same one that handles games and video, rather than being redrawn piece by piece the old way. In practice that means panning and zooming stay smooth even with the whole database loaded, and labels and pins stay crisp as you move. Twenty thousand restaurants stopped being a problem the map has to survive.
It also means the map is finally the same on every device. One map, one look, one set of behaviors, whether you’re on iOS or Android.
What’s next
A better map makes a few things on our roadmap more useful than they’d otherwise be. Once you can filter restaurants by what the community has reported, you’ll be able to watch the map respond as you narrow things down, clusters thinning out until only the places matching what you care about are left.
That depends on the community, as it always does. So keep using the app, and whenever you’re at a restaurant, or thinking back to one you’ve visited, take a minute to answer what you know about it. The map only gets more useful as that picture fills in.
