Share your favorite place with their favorite maps in maps.reinhart1010.id.

Today, we’re excited to announce maps.reinhart1010.id, a free service that lets you share geographical locations without forcing anyone to download and install your preferred map app.

That means you can finally share locations from Waze to those who instead prefer Google Maps or OpenStreetMap and vice-versa!

Believe me, this app isn’t solely built because of Linktree. In fact, we’re already thought all about this feature when we originally built Food Navigator in 2019. And we actually stole Wikipedia’s idea when building this feature for the first time!

Since Apple’ iOS doesn’t offer a standardized way to view map links in different map apps (similar to how Android handles geo: URIs), mobile map apps compete with each other by providing incompatible map app links, which means you (most likely) need to install their own apps to view your friend’s or colleague’s shared location.

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// Caps: Use Waze to drive to Palmerah Utara 1: https://waze.com/ul/hqqguwnzve

// Me: Indonesia, Special Capital Region of Jakarta https://yandex.com/maps/org/100187376781

// Caps: https://urldra.cloud.huawei.com/ifrW8PPMDS

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In Food Navigator, we decided to directly place a list of links which users can click to open in their own map apps such as the one bundled with Windows 8, 10, and 11.

🆕 Sharing a new location

To share a new location, simply visit https://maps.reinhart1010.id/ and enter the place details including coordinates.

However, we know that you’re lazy to copy-and-paste coordinates, so that’s why we offer conversions from tens of unique online map URLs and coordinate formats, including Google Maps’ Plus Codes.

Some map apps commonly copy unnecessary text when you decide to copy or share a specific location from their app. Let’s take the previous example into the test!

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// Caps: Use Waze to drive to Palmerah Utara 1: https://waze.com/ul/hqqguwnzve

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The good news is that you can still copy-paste the original message to our site and let our site automatically detects and parses the URLs for you!

👋 Receiving a new location

Now that your random friend sends you a location, you can choose one of our supported map apps to open and continue the search.

Of course, you can see a list of supported apps under More apps and websites…, and you can assign your favorites for a quick shortcut the next time someone else sends another map link.

⚙️ Behind the scenes

This site is, in fact, the first webapp to be powered using Remix. It’s also the first webapp to run under Cloudflare Pages and Workers. And of course, it’s the first one to use Konsta UI which provides a more native feel for both Android and iOS devices!

Oh wait! I almost forgot to say that this is also the second one to utilize Mapbox (the first one is well, to render live maps on this site) and the first to use Cloudflare’s R2, a Amazon S3-compatible storage service. And finally, also integrated hCaptcha for the very first time to support our cloud-based URL de-shortening service.

That said, the Cloudflare Workers ecosystem has their own limitation in terms of standard libraries and bundle size. Note that Workers are not fully compatible with regular Node.js libraries, and that’s why we ended up using the standardized Fetch API instead of libraries such as Bent and Axios. At least we don’t have to handle with plain old XMLHttpRequest, though.

Aside from that, we originally wanted to use Apple Maps instead for rendering static maps, but soon we decided to remove it due to technical difficulties in signing requests with Cloudflare Workers.

It’s surprising to see that R2 doesn’t support public buckets yet, so we decided to include a workaround which sacrifices our Worker to kindly fetch from R2 and proxy the results. And to prevent spam, we generated limited-time tokens to fetch the static map when absent from R2.

📈 Future plans

Making this app a profit still seems to be a must, especially when our app becomes popular and starts to exhaust the free quotas of Mapbox and Cloudflare. While it’s quite tempting to create a Premium subscription, it will take another few months or so to be able to integrate them in such an efficient way.

That said, you can still donate to us if you find it useful 😄