Spotted by Locals City Guides

Updated: I received a nice, helpful email from one of the developers after my review, which urged me to take another look at the app. I also had an opportunity to visit another city covered by the app. My impressions on another look: The free version on the App Store gives you only a taste of how the app works. To get a real idea if it will work for you, you need to gamble the cost of buying it. Without purchase the downloaded version isn’t very useful. It becomes far more useful when you can read entire entries, filter more, and map locations. So I will bump my original review by a star. I hesitate to award the app a full five stars at this time because I still think it’s important to know more about the “spotters” and their qualifications. The vast majority of the spots listed in the city I just visited were written by just two spotters. Either by accident or design, there was absolutely no overlap in their recommendations. Maybe that will change as more spotters come on board though with the developers’ intention to meet each spotter personally and given that the app has been available for years, that does not seem likely to me. No offense to the spotters who have labored to provide content for this app, but It still is not clear to me from the spotter bios that they know their coffee or old-school local music or whatever. I like the concept of the app. I know people who devote themselves slavishly to the big crowdsourced apps that start with T and Y and the places recommended here are too small to rank on apps like those. All good. I’m looking forward to future versions of this app.

Imagine my disappointment, $3.99 for an App that reviews less than half of Seattle. If it’s South of I-90, there’s virtually no reviews. Undoubtedly the Northern half is the easy pickings for reviewers, but what about the rest of the city? There’s all sorts of great & quirky places around Seatac, Georgetown and Black Diamond, to name a few. Nearby small towns like Enumclaw-a mini Telluride- go completely ignored. It’s lazy reporting, and it’s dishonest to charge for an App that is only focused on one small part of the city. There’s a lot more to Seattle than what’s in Spotted By.

I first heard about SpottedbyLocals when I was studying abroad in Paris in 2009. I usually like to collect recommendations from friends before visiting a new city but in this day and age with social media, people end up seeing certain places on Instagram and Facebook and then just go where they see their friends go. This works sometimes but the problem is that you end up being directed to the same place that all the other people are going to which in effect ends up being touristy. If you’re like me and want to explore a city as someone who lives there would, then this is the app for you. The app itself is nothing special. Basic map with some highlighted spots but the content and curation is what is so key. We went to at least 10 of the recommended places in Mexico City and they were all spot on. You can’t get fair assessments of where to go on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor anymore because their ranking systems have become biased towards the places that pay them. SpottedByLocals is a neutral assessment of amazing places in cities by the people who are proudest to live in them.