Wren

Someone sends you a reel. Five places you have to eat at in Rome, a rooftop bar in Lisbon, a bookshop down an alley in Tokyo, a swimming spot someone swears by. You watch it, you mean to remember, and it is gone by Thursday.

Wren catches them — off a screenshot, out of a list another app exported, or from a guide you already keep. It reads the place names, works out which places they actually are, and drops the lot into a guide in Apple Maps, where you will be standing when you need them.

Restaurants and bars, certainly. Also viewpoints, markets, hotels, galleries, shops, trailheads, beaches and the odd petrol station someone insists does the best coffee for fifty miles. Anywhere with a name and a location.

Three ways in

Places do not only arrive as screenshots, so there are three ways to hand them over. All of them end in the same place: a guide in Apple Maps.

Then you check it

Every place shows what was read beside what was matched, so a wrong match is obvious rather than confident. Anything not found — or found wrongly — can be searched again by hand. Nothing is written to Apple Maps until you say so.

What comes out is not a copy of your places in another app. It is an actual guide, in the Maps you already use, on every device signed in to your Apple Account.

Adding to a guide you already keep

This is the part Apple gives no route to, and it is worth being straight about how it works.

Apple Maps offers no way to add places to a guide that already exists from outside the app. So Wren reads the places out of the guide you share with it, puts the new ones alongside them, and makes one new guide holding everything — which you keep instead of the old one. Wren keeps the places afterwards, so if you delete the wrong guide you can make it again in a tap.

A single place is the exception. Send one on its own and Maps itself offers to add it to a guide you already have, no new guide required.

About a hundred and fifty places fit in one guide. Beyond that Wren splits them into numbered guides and tells you before it does, rather than quietly dropping the ones that would not fit.

No account, no sign-in

Wren has no account and reads nothing from yours. Your screenshots are read on your device and are never uploaded. It does not connect to Instagram or any other service — it sees only the screenshots and files you choose to give it.

Two things leave your phone, both of them small and both of them necessary. The name of a place, sent to Apple Maps so it can be found — exactly as the Maps app does. And, if you paste a shared guide link, that link is sent to Apple to be expanded, because Apple's short links carry nothing that can be read without asking.

Entering a complimentary access code is the only time Wren contacts a server of its own, and the only thing it keeps: it sends the code and a random identifier for the device, so a code cannot be used twice. That identifier is not linked to you, is never used for tracking, and is the single item on Wren's App Store privacy label. The privacy policy sets all of this out in full.

This website is a separate matter, and worth saying plainly rather than burying: it uses Google Analytics to count visits, and only if you accept the notice on your first visit. Decline and it sets no cookies and sends Google nothing. The app itself contains no analytics of any kind.

What it costs

Guides of up to three places are free, for good. Two things are a single one-time purchase: saving a guide with more than three places, and adding to a guide you already have. No subscription, nothing that renews, and it restores on your other devices at no further cost.