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A map of all of Austria down to street level, trains and buses moving live, and every town telling you its own story the first time you open it.
One map for all of Austria
A 3D map you can pull out from street level to the whole of Austria: all 2,092 municipalities, 253,114 places to discover.
spoty opens at street level, in Salzburg's old town – close enough that the buildings stand up in 3D and you can move through the lanes the way you would walk them. The part worth trying is zooming out. Pull back and the map neither stops at the edge of the city nor hands you off to some other view: it keeps going, the same map the whole way, until all of Austria is in front of you. This isn't a map with gaps: all 2,092 Austrian municipalities are on it, each held as its real administrative area rather than a single coordinate. That is what lets the map know which municipality you are actually standing in, and a place gets filed under the right one instead of whichever centre happens to sit nearest. Underneath sit 253,114 individual places – cafés, monuments, squares, buildings with a history behind them – and every one of them is its own Spoty with its own timeline. You move seamlessly between the view of the whole country and a single doorway, in the same window, without switching maps or opening an app. For a country like Austria, made up mostly of small municipalities well outside the big cities, that's the difference between a map that only knows the capital and one that actually looks everywhere.
Landmarks you recognise from the side
Tilt the map: Salzburg Cathedral stands there with its portals, towers and dome – the same silhouette you'd pick it out by on Domplatz.
The map doesn't have to stay a view from directly overhead. Tilt it and the town stands up: flat outlines become volumes, streets get walls, and a place starts looking the way it does when you walk out onto the square. Most buildings are plain shapes at that point – the right height, the right footprint, which is all a row of houses needs to read correctly. The landmarks are modelled properly. At Salzburg Cathedral you get the three arched portals of the west facade, a clock tower either side of them and the dome over the crossing behind – the exact silhouette you'd pick the building out by standing on Domplatz yourself. That is what actually makes a map easy to navigate: you are not reading a label, you are looking for the building you already know. The angle is yours to choose, too – turn the map around a place and look at it from whichever side you would be arriving from. What was one outline among outlines seen from above now has a front.
Trains and buses, live on the map
ÖBB trains, trams, buses and trolleybuses move live on the map – in seven cities, even in their real line colours.
Watch the map for more than a few seconds and you'll see it move: real ÖBB trains crossing the country, plus trams, buses and trolleybuses wherever a city runs them – not timetable icons, actual vehicles in motion. Seven cities go a step further – Salzburg, Vienna, Linz, Graz, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt and Bregenz – where every line renders in its real, official colour, so you can pick your tram out of the traffic without squinting at a number. Tap any stop and its departure board opens right there: next line, next arrival time. That's what turns the map from a place-finder into something you'd actually plan a journey with. Everywhere else in the country the vehicles still move in real time; they just haven't been assigned a line colour yet, a limit on the seven cities' palette, not on where the live movement itself reaches. Whether you're commuting or just passing through, the next train or bus is one glance away, without ever leaving the map you're already exploring.
Every town tells its own story
Open a town for the first time, and spoty researches it for you: an image, population figures and a short history.
Nothing about a town's portrait exists until someone actually opens it – there's no pre-built library sitting behind the scenes, no shelf of finished write-ups waiting to be handed out. The moment you're the one who opens it, spoty starts researching right then: a hero image, population and household figures from Statistik Austria, the town's first documented mention, and a short history of how it became what it is today. What comes back is compact by design – not a wall of text, just the details that make a place feel real. That first look is also what the portrait stays built on: once it exists, it's there for whoever opens that same town next, no re-researching required. A municipality nobody has opened yet simply has no portrait – until you're the one who opens it, at which point it gets one. Multiply that across the country and Austria's picture grows the way the map actually gets used, not from some list somebody compiled once and let go stale.
Ordinary houses have histories too
The map doesn't stop at the landmarks. Open a perfectly ordinary townhouse in the old town and there may be a researched history sitting behind it: the year the building is first documented, a chain of owners named one after another across centuries, and below that a timeline of dated events – building phases, licences, changes of name. At Getreidegasse 10 that starts in 1424 with Chunrad Taufkinds, runs through Sebastian and Andrä Althamer, who built the house's arcaded courtyard, and on to the 19th-century innkeepers under whom the inn changed its name three times. None of it is prose you have to mine for the dates: years sit in a column of their own, each event on its own line, and the source the research rests on is named underneath. Houses like this are the part of the map that exists nowhere else – you'll find a landmark in any guidebook, a townhouse with its chain of owners you won't. It is finished nowhere: the research goes building by building, and anything nobody has worked through yet stays a plain place on the map until it is.
A guided walk to get you started
The first time you open spoty, you get a choice: dive straight in, or let the app show you around first. Choose the guided walk, and the camera flies itself through Salzburg, moving from place to place, showing you how spoty actually works along the way. Somewhere in there, it explains the platform's one real rule: you can only post from where you actually are. That's not fine print buried in a settings menu – it's the first thing the tour tells you, so you understand how the network works before you've clicked on anything yourself. When it's done, you're dropped right into Salzburg, at one of the places you just saw, ready to keep exploring on your own. Prefer to just explore instead? Skip the tour entirely and you land straight on the map – it's offered, not required. For anyone who has never used a place-based map before, it's the fastest way to get the idea without having to feel it out alone.
Find what's nearby
Not everyone wants to click around the map to find one specific place – sometimes you already know the name, or you just want to know what's nearby at all. Search covers both. Type a name, and it takes you straight to the place you meant. Want to browse instead? Choose a category and get back everything that fits, wherever you are or wherever you're currently looking. Results don't land in a list. They come back as cards you swipe through, and at the same time as highlighted rings on the map itself, so you can see at a glance how they sit in the area around you. Search for a city and its card carries the image spoty generated for it; individual places come back with their name and their category. That makes search the shortest path from a question to an answer, without needing to know in advance where on the map to look. It sits right alongside the map itself, so switching between browsing visually and looking something up never means leaving the app or starting over.
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