Scout — Full Product Context

A complete, machine-readable description of the Scout mobile app: what it is, every feature it supports, every screen it has, what it deliberately does not do, and how it sounds. Generated 2026-09-17T18:56:35.873Z.

Catalog at a glance — 1784 patches across 201 themed collections. These counts are pulled live from the catalog every time this page renders.

What Scout Is

Scout is the field guide to the real world: a travel companion app that turns a road trip, a national-park visit, or a history detour into a living collection. The promise is simple — go see the world, earn the patch, keep the journey. The core loop is three steps: discover a place worth the stop, navigate there with the in-app compass or a planned trip, and unlock a patch when you physically arrive. Each digital patch is rendered as an embroidered iron-on and presented full-screen the moment it is collected.

The defining rule is "earned, not bought": you collect a patch only by standing in the place. The unlock is polygon containment against a real boundary — you have to actually be inside the park, the city, the battlefield. There is no proximity radius to describe and no way to fake it from the couch.

The catalog spans thousands of real-world locations organized into hundreds of themed collections, which are in turn grouped into a small number of curated campaigns — National Parks, State Parks, Route 66, City Challenges, the 50 States, Civil War, Founding & Revolution, Native America, Wild West, Ghost Adventures, Roadside Attractions, National Forests, Sports, Zoos, Aquariums, Major Airports, and long-form Road Trips. (Live totals are in the snapshot at the top of this page; the full structure is in the Campaign Index and Collection Index below.) Each patch carries a short editorial write-up, a chronological history, a location card with credited photography, a photo gallery, and its own community board — the app is essentially a field guide to America, playable like a game.

Scout is free, and there is nothing paid inside it — no subscription, no premium tier, no in-app purchase of any kind. All revenue comes from physical embroidered goods sold through a separate storefront. Getting in takes one tap — Google, Apple, or a one-time 6-digit email code — and every entrance is find-or-create, so signing in with no account simply makes one. A fourth path, guest mode, is fully built server-side, but its "Continue as guest" button sits behind a flag that ships off: do not describe Scout as usable without an account unless that flag has been turned on. Where it is enabled, guest sessions are real backend identities, so camera-roll import, the store, and community posting all work before a user ever links an email; when a guest upgrades to a full account, everything they have collected syncs and follows them across devices.

How It Works — The Core Loop

Unlocking a patch

Automatic unlock is polygon containment, and only polygon containment. As the user moves, the app takes their GPS fix, cheaply pre-filters the catalog on-device, and asks the server one question: which of these boundaries actually contain this point? The server answers with a hard geometric containment test against real boundary polygons — OpenStreetMap footprints, buffered street corridors for linear features like Route 66 alignments, and official National Park Service protected-area boundaries.

This applies to every patch type, including cities and states, which carry real boundary polygons like everything else. That is what lets one location unlock a whole nest of patches at once: a photo taken at the Saint Louis Zoo is inside the zoo, inside Forest Park, inside Saint Louis, and inside Missouri — and earns all four. There is no name-matching or reverse-geocoding anywhere in the unlock path; reverse geocoding exists only to label a place in the UI, never to unlock it. A small fixed radius survives solely as a stopgap for the handful of patches that do not yet have a boundary drawn — a coverage gap being closed, not a design tier.

Two guards matter. A GPS fix coarser than about 75 metres of accuracy is stored so the interface always has a position, but is not trusted to unlock anything. And the app refuses to collect until the account's existing collection has loaded from the server, so a cold start in a state you already hold does not re-collect and re-celebrate it.

Navigating there

The compass is a map-first screen built on Scout's own self-hosted basemap. It draws the actual unlock boundary as a dashed brass polygon, along with the patch pin and a pulsing you-are-here marker, and keeps both in frame as the user moves. A console at the bottom shows live distance as a large serif figure, a heading dial, the location photograph, and one gold action — open turn-by-turn directions, or view the patch once it is collected. The whole proximity vocabulary is three literal states in the top bar: TRACKING, then INSIDE THE AREA, then COLLECTED. Arrival is answered by real geometry — a point-in-polygon test against the boundary the map is already drawing — not by a distance threshold standing in for one, and crossing it fires the collect check immediately rather than waiting out the background batching window.

The moment of arrival

When a patch unlocks, a full-screen celebration takes over: a Skia ember field of warm sparks rising over near-black, then the patch artwork rising as a silhouette, pulsing, and crossfading into full colour with haptics and sound, followed by a "BADGE UNLOCKED" kicker, a light sweep across the art, and the place name. Tapping anywhere skips it, and the OS reduce-motion setting jumps straight to the final frame.

Because one location can unlock several nested patches at once, unlocks are queued — the user is owed one celebration each, played in order. Anything unlocked during onboarding is parked and shown once the user reaches an ordinary screen.

Starting with a head start

New users do not start from an empty map. Scout can read the user's camera roll, extract where each photo was taken, and retroactively unlock patches for places they have already been — each patch back-dated to the day of the photo, so a first collection retraces real travel. Matching runs on-device and no pixels leave the phone: only coordinates and timestamps are sent, and only to ask which boundaries contain them. Photo matching deliberately uses looser tolerances than live tracking, because photo GPS drifts indoors and many boundaries are tight footprints.

Planning the trip

Two planning modes sit on top of the loop. A Day Trip is a short itinerary of nearby stops you can do in an afternoon, built by swiping through a deck of nearby patches or picking from a grid. A Road Trip is a long-lived plan between two places: Scout asks a real routing service for the driving route, finds every patch within a chosen detour distance of that road, groups them by the states you will cross, and then gives you a heading-up driving map that counts down to your next stop while patches unlock passively as you pass through them.

Not a solo act

Every patch has its own community board, and a dedicated Community hub gathers a general feed, the boards a scout has favorited, and a search across every board and post. Scouts recommend places, post tips and stories, ask questions before a trip, and upvote what is useful. Authors who have actually collected the patch carry a "visited" badge, so first-hand advice is visible at a glance. Because the patches you earn in the app are the only ones you can order as real embroidered iron-ons, the trip always comes first and the keepsake follows.

Content Model & Vocabulary

Getting these words right matters — several of them look interchangeable and are not.

The hierarchy

Content nests in exactly three levels: Campaign → Collection → Patch.

Patch — one real-world place. The atomic unit. A patch has a name, artwork, a boundary polygon, editorial text, a history, photography, and its own community board.
Collection — a themed set of patches with a finish line, e.g. "Utah's Mighty 5" or "Route 66 · Illinois". A patch belongs to many collections at once — Alcatraz Island counts toward San Francisco, Ghost Adventures, and the NPS sets simultaneously — which is why arriving in one place can move several progress bars.
Campaign — the top-level curated journey, made of several collections presented as one narrative route with its own hero art, voice, and progress. A collection belongs to at most one campaign. A campaign owns no patches directly; its totals are the sum of its member collections. Campaign membership is a label, not a filter — a member collection still appears in the ordinary patch browser.

Campaigns are the app's top-level browse surface. A campaign with exactly one collection (Zoos, Aquariums, Major Airports) collapses the middle level entirely and renders its collection directly, so a one-node journey does not put an extra tap between the user and the patches.

Terms that are easy to get wrong

City Challenge — a curated per-city set of stops ("collect all 11 things in Boston"). It is not a separate entity: a City Challenge is simply a collection belonging to the City Challenges campaign. It is not the free-text city field on a patch, and it is not derived from reverse geocoding.
Nest — the set of patches whose boundaries all contain a single point. Standing in one spot can unlock the whole nest.
Category — a separate, parallel grouping (Nature, Cities, History, Culture, States, Sports, Airports). Every collection has exactly one category and, independently, at most one campaign. Categories and campaigns are not nested inside each other; a campaign's collections can span categories.
Patch type — what kind of place a patch is (park, museum, battlefield, stadium, state park, roadside americana, and dozens more). The type drives an icon, a colour, and a type-specific data tab on patch detail.
The Album — the user's own photos filed by place. It is not the patch gallery and not the trophy case; it is a private, on-device archive.
Trophy case / My Patches — the patches a user has collected, grouped by collection.
Handle — the unique, permanent name a scout appears under everywhere: post and comment bylines, patch photos, direct-message threads, the public profile and its share card, and the @-mention picker. It is derived from the email local part (lowercased, accents folded, +tag and punctuation dropped) with collisions broken by a numeric or id-derived suffix. It is not the profile URL slug, which is a separate value carrying its own hash suffix.

What a patch carries

Beyond name and artwork: a short editorial summary, a "why visit" pull quote, historical significance, an established date and historical period, a chronological list of key events, notable figures, a location photograph with photographer credit and licence, National Park Service data where applicable (designation, fees, hours, activities, topics), and a type-specific data block appropriate to what kind of place it is. Location imagery is credited — the credit tracks whichever image is currently showing, whether that is the location photo, official NPS imagery, or a scout's own uploaded photo.

Feature Inventory

Hero features (the most visually filmable)

Arrival and unlock — the moment the boundary is crossed, the patch collects itself and a full-screen celebration fires: an ember spark field, the artwork rising from silhouette into full colour, a light sweep, the place name. It is the emotional payoff of physically arriving somewhere, and a nested location plays one celebration per patch earned.
The driving road trip — a heading-up map that follows the actual road, a bead rail placing one bead per stop at its true position along the route, and a console counting down in road miles to the next patch. Patches unlock passively as you drive through them; the app tells the driver to keep their eyes on the road because collecting happens by arriving.
Camera-roll retrace — backfill a collection from photos the user already has. Scout reads each photo's coordinates, matches them against real boundaries, and unlocks patches retroactively with the original photo date preserved, drawing a route across a map as the scan progresses. A patch "earned" three years ago shows up dated three years ago.

Discovery and collecting

Home — a context-aware dashboard rather than a fixed layout. Away from anything it leads with the nearest patch. Within range of a City Challenge it shows a progress band naming the city, its bead rail, and the closest stop you do not have. Standing inside a city it switches into place mode: the whole screen becomes that place — a place hero with a progress ring, a numbered trail of stops, your photos of it, its community board, and a row showing which other collections being here also moves. Standing inside a national park it says "You're inside" and shows the park's photos, board, and nest.
Near Me — nearby patches inside an adjustable radius dial, with a spotlight hero, a walkable marquee, and lists banded by distance.
Explorer map — a full-bleed dark field-guide map on Scout's own self-hosted basemap. Patches are photo medallions in a brass ring; a camera rail handles centering, jumping to the nearest uncollected patch, and toggling collected ones; filters cover campaign, radius, and collected state. Tapping a pin pans without re-zooming, so the scale you were reading at survives. A location picker lets you browse another city — and that preview never affects what you can unlock.
Compass — described in the core loop above. Reachable from the drawer, the home hero, Near Me cards, and patch detail.
Patch browser — the searchable catalog with per-collection progress headers, filters for status, category, collection and radius, and a search mode offering recents, live suggestions, and popular-nearby. It also serves as "Find a patch" and "My Patches".
Patch detail — a field-guide entry with a hero image pager and up to six tabs: Overview (why visit, and every collection this patch advances), History (the story, an established-date and period strip, and a chronological timeline), an optional type-specific tab, Gallery (official imagery plus scout photos), Community (the patch's board), and My Visit (your own matched photos, once you have any). A more menu offers show patch, check in, directions, send feedback, and remove from collection.
Removing a wrongly-awarded patch — any user can remove a patch from their own collection. Camera-roll import can award a patch off bad photo metadata, and a collection you cannot correct is not really yours. Removal touches only ownership: published photos, posts, and comments survive.

Campaigns and progress

Campaign gallery — a snap-scrolling stack of full-bleed campaign covers, two per screen; the photograph is the tap target, with no card and no CTA row.
Campaign detail — a Ken-Burns hero over a trail of stops, drawn as one of several themed spines: an asphalt road with a gold centerline and state mile markers, or a dotted footpath with nature glyphs. Each stop fans up to three member patch thumbnails, collected ones sorted to the front.
Honest progress — an unstarted campaign states its size and draws no progress track at all, because a row of empty bars reads as a row of failures. A started campaign never prints "0%": one stop into a large campaign renders as less than one percent, with the bar floored so it is visible.
Collection completion — completing a collection is detected and surfaced as a completed-collections stat and a completion band on the City Challenge home.

Trips and planning

Day Trip — build one by swiping a deck of nearby patches or ticking a grid with a radius stepper, or adopt a Scout-authored curated trip near you. You get a named plan, a routed map, auto-collect on arrival, and a shareable recap when the last stop is collected. One day trip is live at a time; the rest are saved.
Road Trip — pick a destination, get the real driving route, then choose stops from patches along the corridor grouped by state, with a detour-distance control that hides rather than deletes your picks so widening gives them back. Save it now, drive it later.
Turn-by-turn guidance — Scout gives real driving directions on its own map: a maneuver banner for the next turn, live off-route detection, and automatic rerouting to rejoin the road if you leave it. You do not have to hand the trip to another navigation app to drive it.
Driving views — three camera framings: Driving (heading-up, taking its bearing from the road ahead rather than the next vertex, with zoom and pitch ramping as you close on a stop), Follow (north-up, flat), and Route (the whole road in frame).
Trip stops — the itinerary as a printable-looking document: numbered photo discs on a connecting rail, each marked with its category and status, with the current stop marked by both a ring and the words "NEXT UP" so nothing depends on colour alone.
My Trips — every day trip in one place, chipped live, saved, or done, with read-only recaps for finished ones.
Trips follow the account, not the phone. A signed-in scout's trips sync through the same channel their patches do, so a trip planned on one device is there on the next.

Achievements

A catalog of 144 achievements across six families: place types, volume milestones, geographic feats, habits, app fluency, and Wild Cards — the oddities and one-offs. Each carries its own artwork, a short "how to unlock" line, and a flat experience value feeding a level and a daily streak.
Earned in person, and only in person. Only patches collected by physically being somewhere count toward an achievement. Patches recovered through camera-roll import fill your map but earn no achievement progress — a deliberate rule, because achievements are the part of Scout that rewards having actually gone.
Nothing is hidden. Wild Cards used to be withheld until earned; they are not any more. Every achievement is visible with its name and its unlock condition from the start, so chasing one is a choice rather than a guess.
Awarded retroactively. When an achievement is switched on, it is immediately granted to everyone who already qualified — nobody has to go back and re-earn it.

Sharing Scout

Invite a friend — every signed-in scout gets a short invite code. When a friend signs up and collects their first patch, the referrer climbs a three-step rewards ladder: three qualified friends unlock permanent cloud album access, five earn the Scout patch (the branded compass emblem), and ten earn the Compass Snapback (free for the first 30 scouts to reach it; after that the rung pays a two-for-one on hats instead, so nobody who earns it gets nothing). Nothing pays below three qualified friends and no physical merchandise below five — the ladder is priced so that a single invited account is not worth farming. The rungs are cumulative: reaching ten friends pays the three- and five-friend rewards too, not only the top rung. The reward goes to the referrer only, and codes cannot be traded back and forth for mutual credit.
Rewards — what a referral (and, eventually, other things a scout does) actually pays out: a single-use store discount code, good for one item, with an expiry and no order minimum — redeemable on its own, because a reward that requires a purchase is not a reward. Redeemed inside the in-app store. A reward earned shows up as a badge on the drawer's Rewards row and a notification the next time the app is checked; nothing is pushed to the device.

The Album and field records

The Album — the user's own photos filed by where they were taken, grouped by state, city, or campaign, with a rotating spotlight and rows of places. By default nothing leaves the phone: Scout stores a reference to the photo, never the photo. The Album is read straight from the device's own library.
Cloud album backup (built, and gated off by default) — an account that has been granted access, by an admin or by earning it through referrals, can have its matched photos backed up. This is the one place the "nothing leaves the phone" rule stops applying, and the app's own copy changes to say so. What uploads is a re-encoded, resized copy — never the original file — with location and camera metadata stripped out of the image itself. Sharing is deliberate and per-action; nothing becomes public automatically.
Publish to a patch gallery — from the My Visit tab, a scout can publish one of their own photos to a patch's public gallery. It confirms every time, strips metadata, and is reversible; publishing copies the photo rather than moving it.
50 States map — a share-oriented "field record": the US drawn as an inked survey plate, states shaded by how deeply you have collected them, three ticket-stub stats, and a share button exporting a portrait card. A state fills when its own state patch is collected; other patches inside it add depth.
National Parks map — the sibling record, with a dot per park, an inset for the two off-map parks, and a receipt-style roll of the parks you hold grouped by region.

Community and safety

One scout, one name — every account posts under a permanent handle rather than a raw email address, assigned automatically at signup, so a person reads as the same name on their posts, their comments, their photos and their public profile. Guests carry a generated anon-<animal>-<number> handle, re-derived from the real address if they later sign up.
Community hub — a general discussion feed sortable by new or top, a strip of favorited boards, and a search across every board and post.
Per-patch boards — every patch has its own board with posts (title, body, photos, upvotes, comments), a new/top sort, admin pinning, and threaded comments that appear optimistically before the server confirms. Authors who collected the patch carry a "visited" badge.
Scout recommendations — a per-patch vouch count and tips from people who have been there, surfaced on the Overview tab.
Reporting and blocking — one shared sheet on every user-content surface offers delete (your own), report with a reason, and block. Blocking is symmetric and enforced across every feed, thread, photo list, vote, and reply; attempts to interact across a block behave as if the content does not exist rather than announcing the block. A blocked-accounts screen lists everyone you have blocked with an unblock action.
Moderation — reports feed an internal queue where content can be removed and an author suspended in a single action; suspension is enforced on posting, commenting, and uploading. A narrow pre-publication text filter catches slurs and sexual solicitation.
Notifications — an in-app inbox for replies to your posts and comments, @-mentions of you, upvotes on your content, and direct messages from Scout. Events collapse into groups ("4 people upvoted your post"), each type can be muted independently in settings, and tapping one opens the exact post or reply it refers to. It is discovered when the app fetches — Scout sends no push notifications. Announcements and release notes are not here; they are pinned posts on the community board. Members cannot message each other.

Account, settings, and support

Authentication — Google, Apple, or a one-time 6-digit email code; every entrance is find-or-create. "Continue as guest" is built but gated behind guest_mode, which ships off, so it is not normally a fourth option (see Feature Status). Where the flag is on, a guest session is a real backend identity, so import, the store, and community posting work immediately; guest purchases migrate on sign-in. Onboarding is two permission screens — location, then notifications — with neutral wording, and the declined-location screen points at camera-roll import as the genuine alternative.
Profile — the scout's handle, patches collected, progress, a grid of recent badges, a share action that opens the public web profile, and sign out / delete account. The handle is displayed, not edited: no screen anywhere in the app changes it.
Settings — location tracking, notification preferences (a screen of per-type toggles), public-profile visibility, and click sound; feedback and support; blocked accounts, privacy policy, and terms; and destructive tools (clear cache, reset progress) that confirm first.
FAQ and feedback — a server-loaded FAQ accordion, and a two-mode form for sending feedback or suggesting a place.
Store — an in-app web view of the shop that hands off the user's session so a signed-in scout lands already signed in and sees the patches they have earned.
Deep links — every screen in the app has a scout:// deep link.

Every Screen in the App

A visual inventory of every user-facing route in the Scout mobile app — 58 screens across 10 groups.

Every route also has a scout:// deep link; route groups in parentheses are not part of the URL, so /(drawer)/map is scout://map. Screens marked (dev only) are visible only in development builds or to admins. Screenshots are added as they are captured; missing slots show a placeholder with the route name. Public web surfaces are listed separately further down.

Onboarding & Auth

Sign In — /auth — **Sign In** `/auth`
The sign-in landing, headed by the SCOUT wordmark and the line "A field guide of your own." A ruled "Sign in or create account" label states outright that every entrance is find-or-create — signing in with no account creates one. Apple and Google share a row (iOS; Android is Google alone), then "Continue with email". A "Continue as guest" row exists but is behind a flag that ships off, so it is not normally visible. Footer links open Terms and Privacy in an in-app browser.

Sign In · Email Code — /auth/email — **Sign In · Email Code** `/auth/email`
Passwordless two-step entry: enter an email and press "Send code", then fill a 6-digit segmented input and press "Verify & continue". The subtitle says the address is signed in OR given a new account, since the Profile is created at code-request time. A "Resend code" link sits behind a 30-second cooldown.

Onboarding · Invite Code — /onboarding-referral — **Onboarding · Invite Code** `/onboarding-referral`
An optional beat during onboarding where a new scout can enter the invite code a friend gave them. Codes are always typed or pasted by hand — opening an invite link never claims a code on the visitor's behalf. Skippable, and enterable later from the invite screen while the claim window is still open.

Onboarding · Location — /onboarding-location — **Onboarding · Location** `/onboarding-location`
The first permission beat. Continuing fires the OS location prompt; granting holds a brief confirmation then auto-advances, and denying shows a denied state that points at camera-roll import as the alternative.

Onboarding · Notifications — /onboarding-notifications — **Onboarding · Notifications** `/onboarding-notifications`
The final onboarding beat. Continuing fires the OS notification prompt, then routes home regardless of the answer.

Location Required — /location-permission — **Location Required** `/location-permission`
The recovery modal when location is off after onboarding has run. Explains what it enables and offers "Open Settings" or "Continue Without Location".

Home & Discovery

Home — /(drawer)/ — **Home** `/(drawer)/`
The main dashboard, and the screen that changes most with context. Away from anything it leads with the nearest patch, then a trip or City Challenge slot, a campaigns carousel, a camera-roll import band, and an explorer map card. Close to a city it switches into place mode; inside a national park it says "You’re inside".

Near Me — /(drawer)/near-me — **Near Me** `/(drawer)/near-me`
Nearby patches inside an adjustable "WITHIN" radius dial: a spotlight hero with navigate, check-in and details, a walkable marquee, and lists banded by distance. Empty and all-collected states show a radar prompting you to widen the dial or plan a day trip.

Map — /(drawer)/map — **Map** `/(drawer)/map`
The full-bleed discovery map on Scout’s self-hosted field-guide basemap. Photo-medallion markers, a you-are-here pin, a radius circle, a camera rail, campaign and distance filters, a location picker for browsing other cities, and a bottom console paging through nearby patches.

Compass — /compass — **Compass** `/compass`
Live navigation toward one nearby uncollected patch. Draws the real unlock boundary plus a pulsing user marker and the patch pin, over a console showing live distance, a heading dial, and the location photo. Crossing the boundary fires the collect check immediately.

Browse Patches — /browse-patches — **Browse Patches** `/browse-patches`
The searchable, filterable catalog: a two-column card grid grouped by collection with per-collection progress headers, removable filter pills, and a search mode offering recents, live suggestions and popular-nearby. Also serves as "Find a patch" and "My Patches".

Patches & Collecting

Patch Detail — /patch-modal/[id] — **Patch Detail** `/patch-modal/[id]`
The full field-guide entry for a place. A hero image pager sits above tabbed content — Overview, History, an optional type-specific tab, Gallery, Community, and My Visit once you have your own photos there — with an action sheet for check-in, directions, feedback and removing the patch from your collection.

Patch Gallery (Lightbox) — /patch-gallery/[id] — **Patch Gallery (Lightbox)** `/patch-gallery/[id]`
A fullscreen swipeable pager for a patch’s photos with pinch and pan. Tapping toggles the chrome; community photos can be reported, and your own gallery photos published or unpublished.

Lightbox — /lightbox — **Lightbox** `/lightbox`
The same fullscreen viewer for imagery that has no patch id — post and comment attachments. It reads from a shared store, so a cold deep link shows an empty state and returns.

Trophy Case — /collected-patches — **Trophy Case** `/collected-patches`
Achievements grouped by collection, showing only collections where at least one patch is collected. Each section carries its own progress bar, and uncollected patches inside those collections render as silhouettes.

Celebration — /celebration — **Celebration** `/celebration`
The post-collect reward moment: an ember spark field, the artwork rising from silhouette into full colour with haptics and sound, a light sweep, and the place name, then buttons to view the patch or keep exploring. Tapping anywhere skips it; reduce-motion jumps to the final frame.

Submit a Patch — /submit-patch — **Submit a Patch** `/submit-patch`
Suggest a new place: a photo, a name, an optional collection, an auto-detected location card, and notes. Currently behind a feature flag that ships off.

Retrace · Camera Roll Import — /import-modal — **Retrace · Camera Roll Import** `/import-modal`
The multi-beat camera-roll flow. It scans your photo library — or one album, or hand-picked photos — for coordinate matches against patch boundaries, drawing a route across a map as it goes, then lets you choose what to claim before syncing.

Store — /store-webview — **Store** `/store-webview`
The in-app web view of the shop. It hands off the user’s session so a signed-in scout lands already authenticated and sees the patches they have earned.

Achievements

Campaigns

Campaign — /campaign/[id] — **Campaign** `/campaign/[id]`
A themed campaign overview — a Ken-Burns hero, a progress summary, and a description, over a trail of stops drawn as an asphalt road with mile markers or a dotted footpath. Single-collection campaigns render their collection directly.

Campaign Collection — /campaign-collection/[id] — **Campaign Collection** `/campaign-collection/[id]`
One campaign stop’s patches under a full-bleed hero, with a progress bar, a toggle between patch-art and photo-card grids, and an all / collected / uncollected filter.

Trips & Planning

Day Trip — /(drawer)/trips — **Day Trip** `/(drawer)/trips`
The Day Trip home, laid out ownership before recommendation: a spotlight hero for your live trip or the best curated trip nearby, then your own trips, a "build your own" row, and a curated shelf.

Road Trip — /(drawer)/road-trip — **Road Trip** `/(drawer)/road-trip`
The Road Trip home — the same layout with A-to-B meta lines instead of distances, and an actionable "Where are you driving?" chip that opens the planner.

Day Trip Planner — /trip-planner — **Day Trip Planner** `/trip-planner`
A swipeable deck of nearby patches with undo, plus a grid mode with checkbox tiles and a radius stepper. The candidate list is frozen on open so GPS drift cannot reshuffle the deck mid-swipe.

Road Trip Planner — /road-planner — **Road Trip Planner** `/road-planner`
Two states in one screen: your saved road plans and route presets over a from/to builder, then a stop picker grouping patches along the real driving route into collapsible per-state sections with a detour-distance control.

My Trips — /my-trips — **My Trips** `/my-trips`
Every day trip in chronological order, chipped live, saved or done. Saved makes a trip active; done opens a read-only recap.

Trip Preview — /trip-preview — **Trip Preview** `/trip-preview`
A trip before you commit to it: a tappable timeline of its stops and one primary button — resume your own, or start a curated one — with a named warning when starting would replace an active trip.

Trip Map — /trip-map — **Trip Map** `/trip-map`
The live map for the trip you are on, in day-trip or road-trip form, with a bead rail and a driving console. When the trip has just been archived it renders the finale recap — stop order, mileage, drive time.

Trip Stops — /trip-stops — **Trip Stops** `/trip-stops`
The full itinerary as a vertical document: numbered photo discs on a connecting rail, each labelled with category and status — a collected check, a pulsing NEXT UP ring, or the drive leg to the next stop.

The Album & Field Records

The Album — /(drawer)/album — **The Album** `/(drawer)/album`
Your own photos filed by where you took them. A rotating photo spotlight over a dial that regroups by state, city or campaign, and rows of places with thumbnail stacks. Photos stay on the device.

Cloud Album — /cloud-album — **Cloud Album** `/cloud-album`
Backup status and controls for scouts who have been granted cloud album access, by an admin or by earning it through referrals. Shows how many photos are backed up, what is queued, and lets a place or the whole album be shared by link. Backup runs on Wi-Fi only. Gated behind a flag that ships off, so most accounts never see it.

Album · Place — /album-place — **Album · Place** `/album-place`
One album page for a single state, city, campaign or place: a spotlight hero over sectioned rows or a single grid. Photos open in a lightbox and can be removed with a confirmation.

50 States Map — /(drawer)/states-map — **50 States Map** `/(drawer)/states-map`
A share-oriented field record: the US as an inked survey plate shaded by how deeply you have collected each state, three ticket-stub stats, and a share button exporting a portrait card.

National Parks Map — /(drawer)/national-parks-map — **National Parks Map** `/(drawer)/national-parks-map`
The sibling record for the national parks — the same plate with a dot per park, an inset for the two off-map parks, and a roll of the parks you hold grouped by region.

Community

Post Detail — /post/[id] — **Post Detail** `/post/[id]`
A single post — author byline, body, a tappable image carousel, an upvote, and threaded comments supporting reply, like and delete. An overflow menu offers report and block, or delete for the author and admins.

New Post (board) — /post-create/[id] — **New Post (board)** `/post-create/[id]`
Composer for a new thread on a specific patch’s board — title, body, and optional uploaded photos.

New Post (general) — /community-new — **New Post (general)** `/community-new`
Composer for the general, patch-less board reached from the Community hub.

Account, Notifications & Support

Profile /(drawer)/profile

Identity and progress: avatar, name, a patches-collected progress bar, a grid of recent patch badges, and a share button that opens your public web profile. Account rows offer sign out and delete account.

Settings — /(drawer)/settings — **Settings** `/(drawer)/settings`
Preferences (location tracking, notification settings, public profile, click sound), help and feedback, safety and privacy (blocked accounts, privacy policy, terms), and destructive data tools that confirm before running.

FAQ — /(drawer)/faq — **FAQ** `/(drawer)/faq`
Server-loaded frequently-asked questions as accordion sections by category, with a help card at the bottom as an escape hatch into feedback.

Feedback — /(drawer)/feedback — **Feedback** `/(drawer)/feedback`
A segmented control picks feedback or suggest-a-patch, then a counted textarea feeds a sticky send button. Reached from Settings, the FAQ and the patch action sheet.

Invite a Friend — /invite — **Invite a Friend** `/invite`
The scout's own invite code with a share action, a count of friends who have joined and qualified, and the three-step reward ladder: permanent cloud album access at three qualified friends, the Scout patch at five, and the Compass Snapback at ten (free for the first 30, then a two-for-one on hats). Nothing pays below three. Also carries the late-entry row for typing in a code you were given, while the claim window is still open.

Rewards — /rewards — **Rewards** `/rewards`
Redirects into the in-app store's own Rewards page: every reward a scout has earned, grouped as Available, Used and Expired, with an Apply-to-cart action on each redeemable one. Reached from a drawer row that badges with the count still unclaimed.

Blocked Accounts — /(drawer)/blocked-accounts — **Blocked Accounts** `/(drawer)/blocked-accounts`
The users you have blocked, each with an unblock action that confirms first. Reached from Settings.

Notifications — /notifications — **Notifications** `/notifications`
Replies, @-mentions, upvotes and messages from Scout. Messages sit in their own lane above the activity feed so an offer is not buried. Repeated events on the same post collapse into one row, and tapping opens the exact post or reply. Mark-all-read and pull-to-refresh; the Home bell badges with the unread count.

Notification Settings — /notification-settings — **Notification Settings** `/notification-settings`
Per-type toggles for replies, mentions, upvotes and messages from Scout, all on by default. Separately, a device-local toggle for the banner your phone shows the moment a patch unlocks.

Messages (redirect) — /messages — **Messages (redirect)** `/messages`
Kept as a redirect to the notification inbox so already-shared links keep working. The broadcast inbox it used to render no longer exists.

Direct Message — /message/[id] — **Direct Message** `/message/[id]`
One direct message from Scout in full — title, body and an optional image. Visible only to its recipient.

Developer Tools

Feature flags — /(drawer)/feature-flags — Feature flags *(dev only)* `/(drawer)/feature-flags`
Every feature flag with its description, server value and any local override, plus a per-flag switch and a clear-override link.

Set location — /(drawer)/dev-location — Set location *(dev only)* `/(drawer)/dev-location`
Overrides device GPS for testing — real patch places with nested landmarks, and deliberately off-patch coordinates for exercising empty states. Unlike the map’s city preview, this genuinely moves the user and does feed unlock.

Album Encode Probe (dev only) — /(drawer)/dev-album-encode — **Album Encode Probe (dev only)** `/(drawer)/dev-album-encode`
A diagnostic that runs a photo through the cloud-album encode pipeline and reports the result, used to check that portrait, landscape, screenshot, panorama and iCloud-offloaded originals all survive resizing. Temporary tooling, not a product surface.

Screenshot Reset (dev only) — /screenshot-reset — **Screenshot Reset (dev only)** `/screenshot-reset`
Resets local state into a known arrangement so App Store and Play screenshots can be captured consistently. Never reachable in a production build.

Deep links — /(drawer)/dev-deep-links — Deep links *(dev only)* `/(drawer)/dev-deep-links`
The in-app launcher for the whole route registry, listing every scout:// URL grouped by category, with a patch picker for routes that take an id.

Simulate drive — /(drawer)/dev-simulate-drive — Simulate drive *(dev only)* `/(drawer)/dev-simulate-drive`
Drives a saved trip programmatically at a chosen speed multiplier to exercise real unlocks along the route.

Campaign Index (19)

Campaigns are the app's top-level browse surface. The hierarchy is strictly three levels — Campaign → Collection → Patch — and a collection belongs to at most one campaign. This index is pulled live from the catalog on every render and lists only collections that actually reach the app.

National Parks (11 collections)

From Acadia to Alaska

Alaska · Pacific Northwest · California · Utah's Mighty 5 · Desert Southwest · Rocky Mountains · Great Plains & Heartland · Great Lakes & Upper Midwest · Appalachia & the Mid-Atlantic · The Southeast · Islands & Shores

Route 66 (8 collections)

Get your kicks across 8 states

Illinois · Missouri · Kansas · Oklahoma · Texas · New Mexico · Arizona · California

Road Trips (6 collections)

The ridge line and the coast road

Blue Ridge Parkway · Pacific Coast Highway · Great River Road · Overseas Highway · Texas Hill Country · Natchez Trace Parkway

City Challenges (64 collections)

A collection to complete for each city!

Albuquerque · Atlanta · Austin · Baltimore · Birmingham · Boston · Buffalo · Charleston · Charlotte · Chattanooga · Chicago · Cincinnati · Cleveland · Colorado Springs · Columbus · Corpus Christi · Dallas · Denver · Detroit · El Paso · Fort Worth · Fresno · Honolulu · Houston · Indianapolis · Jacksonville · Kansas City · Key West · Las Vegas · Long Beach · Los Angeles · Louisville · Memphis · Mesa · Miami · Milwaukee · Minneapolis · Nashville · New Orleans · New York City · Oakland · Oklahoma City · Omaha · Orlando · Philadelphia · Phoenix · Pittsburgh · Portland · Sacramento · Salem · Salt Lake City · San Antonio · San Diego · San Francisco · San Jose · Savannah · Seattle · Springfield · St. Louis · Tampa · Tucson · Tulsa · Virginia Beach · Washington DC

State Parks (50 collections)

The land the National Parks didn't get to

Alabama State Parks · Alaska State Parks · Arizona State Parks · Arkansas State Parks · California State Parks · Colorado State Parks · Connecticut State Parks · Delaware State Parks · Florida State Parks · Georgia State Parks · Hawaii State Parks · Idaho State Parks · Illinois State Parks · Indiana State Parks · Iowa State Parks · Kansas State Parks · Kentucky State Parks · Louisiana State Parks · Maine State Parks · Maryland State Parks · Massachusetts State Parks · Michigan State Parks · Minnesota State Parks · Mississippi State Parks · Missouri State Parks · Montana State Parks · Nebraska State Parks · Nevada State Parks · New Hampshire State Parks · New Jersey State Parks · New Mexico State Parks · New York State Parks · North Carolina State Parks · North Dakota State Parks · Ohio State Parks · Oklahoma State Parks · Oregon State Parks · Pennsylvania State Parks · Rhode Island State Parks · South Carolina State Parks · South Dakota State Parks · Tennessee State Parks · Texas State Parks · Utah State Parks · Vermont State Parks · Virginia State Parks · Washington State Parks · West Virginia State Parks · Wisconsin State Parks · Wyoming State Parks

50 States (6 collections)

All fifty, one region at a time

The West · The Southwest · The Midwest · The South · The Northeast · Alaska & Hawaii

Roadside Attractions (8 collections)

Muffler men, giant food and the beautifully strange along the American highway

Roadside Giants · Roadside Oddities · Muffler Men · Big Food · Buildings That Look Like Things · Aliens & Cryptids · Folk Art Environments · Roadside Statues

US Cities (5 collections)

Fifty-four cities, coast to coast. Get inside the city limits to collect!

The West · The Southwest · The Midwest · The South · The Northeast

National Forests (11 collections)

96 forests, one wild map

Alaska · Pacific Northwest · California · The Mountain West — Utah · Desert Southwest · Rocky Mountains · Great Plains & Heartland · Great Lakes & Upper Midwest · Appalachia & the Mid-Atlantic · The Southeast · Islands & Northeast

Ghost Adventures (5 collections)

America’s most haunted houses, hotels, asylums and grounds

Haunted Houses & Mansions · Haunted Hotels & Inns · Asylums & Penitentiaries · Haunted Grounds · Famous Graveyards

Sports (3 collections)

Every arena, ballpark and stadium in the big three

NFL Stadiums · MLB Ballparks · NBA Arenas

Civil War (4 collections)

From Sumter to Appomattox

The Eastern Theater · The Western Theater · The Carolinas & the Coast · Trans-Mississippi

Founding & Revolution (5 collections)

Where the country was argued into existence

New England & New York · The Mid-Atlantic · The Southern Campaign · The Chesapeake · Colonial Foundations

Wild West (3 collections)

Boomtowns, forts and last stands

Boomtowns & Ghost Towns · Frontier Forts & Trading Posts · Outlaws & Last Stands

Native America (7 collections)

Twelve thousand years, thirty-five places

Ancestral Puebloan · Hohokam, Sinagua & Salado · The Mound Builders · Plains & Great Lakes Nations · Alaska & the Northwest · Native Hawaii · Missions & Contact

Zoos (1 collections)

Thirty-six American zoos

Zoos

Aquariums (1 collections)

Twenty-one windows on the deep

Aquariums

Major Airports (1 collections)

Forty terminals, one very frequent flyer

Major Airports

Small Town America (0 collections)

The towns the interstate went around

Collection Index (201)

Every collection a user can actually see, alphabetically. Admin-only collections are excluded — they are stripped before the app ever syncs them.

Alabama State Parks

Alaska

Alaska & Hawaii

Alaska & the Northwest

Alaska State Parks

Albuquerque

Must-see landmarks, culture, and high-desert sights across Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Aliens & Cryptids

UFO watchtowers, alien highways, and the cryptid legends that put small towns on the map.

Ancestral Puebloan

Appalachia & the Mid-Atlantic

Aquariums

A curated collection of the best and most notable aquariums across the United States.

Arizona

Arizona State Parks

Arkansas State Parks

Asylums & Penitentiaries

Atlanta

Discover the capital of the New South and civil rights history

Austin

Keep it weird in the Live Music Capital of the World

Baltimore

Harbor history, ballparks, and cultural landmarks across Baltimore, Maryland.

Big Food

Giant roadside food sculptures and quirky food museums across America.

Birmingham

Civil rights landmarks and iron-and-steel history across Birmingham, Alabama.

Blue Ridge Parkway

America’s most-visited stretch of scenic road: 469 miles of Appalachian ridge line linking Shenandoah to the Great Smokies.

Boomtowns & Ghost Towns

Boston

Walk through American history in the Cradle of Liberty

Buffalo

Architecture, waterfront and wings across Buffalo, New York.

Buildings That Look Like Things

Duck and mimetic architecture — the 1920s-50s boom of programmatic buildings shaped like what they sold.

California

California State Parks

Charleston

Antebellum streets, harbor forts and live oaks across Charleston, South Carolina.

Charlotte

Iconic landmarks, museums, and attractions across Charlotte, North Carolina.

Chattanooga

Lookout Mountain, the Tennessee River and the Choo Choo, across Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Chicago

Explore the Windy City's architecture, art, and lakefront

Cincinnati

Riverfront landmarks, historic markets and museums across Cincinnati, Ohio.

Cleveland

Must-see landmarks, museums and lakefront spots across Cleveland, Ohio.

Colonial Foundations

Colorado Springs

Red rocks, America's Mountain, and Front Range icons across Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Colorado State Parks

Columbus

Statehouse history, arts districts, and Buckeye icons across Columbus, Ohio.

Connecticut State Parks

Corpus Christi

Gulf beaches, a WWII carrier and barrier islands across Corpus Christi, Texas.

Dallas

JFK history, arts, gardens, and big-league landmarks across Dallas, Texas.

Delaware State Parks

Denver

Explore the Mile High City's outdoor adventures and cultural attractions

Desert Southwest

Detroit

Motown sound, auto-age innovation, and riverfront landmarks across Detroit, Michigan.

El Paso

Franklin Mountains, Spanish missions, and border heritage across El Paso, Texas.

Famous Graveyards

A curated collection of historically significant and notable cemeteries across the United States.

Florida State Parks

Folk Art Environments

Sites one untrained person spent a lifetime building, usually alone.

Fort Worth

Cowtown stockyards and a world-class museum district across Fort Worth, Texas.

Fresno

Underground gardens, Central Valley parks, and historic landmarks across Fresno, California.

Frontier Forts & Trading Posts

Georgia State Parks

Great Lakes & Upper Midwest

Great Plains & Heartland

Great River Road

Two thousand miles down the spine of the country, following the Mississippi from the headwaters at Lake Itasca — narrow enough to walk across on stepping stones — through Minneapolis, past a pre-Columbian city larger than London was at the time, under the Gateway Arch, along Beale Street, and into New Orleans. Eleven stops, ten states of river.

Haunted Grounds

Haunted Hotels & Inns

Haunted Houses & Mansions

Hawaii State Parks

Hohokam, Sinagua & Salado

Honolulu

Beaches, craters and royal history across Honolulu, Hawaii.

Houston

Space exploration, the Museum District, and bayou parks across Houston, Texas.

Idaho State Parks

Illinois

Illinois State Parks

Indiana State Parks

Indianapolis

Racing heritage, monuments, and museums across Indianapolis, Indiana.

Iowa State Parks

Islands & Northeast

Islands & Shores

Jacksonville

Beaches, the St. Johns River, and coastal nature across Jacksonville, Florida.

Kansas

Kansas City

WWI memorial, jazz and baseball heritage, fountains, and BBQ-town landmarks across Kansas City, Missouri.

Kansas State Parks

Kentucky State Parks

Key West

Iconic landmarks, museums, and natural sights across Key West, Florida.

Las Vegas

Experience the Entertainment Capital of the World

Long Beach

Waterfront icons, canals, and coastal culture across Long Beach, California.

Los Angeles

Explore the entertainment capital with Hollywood glamour and beaches

Louisiana State Parks

Louisville

Derby racing, bourbon, baseball bats, and Ohio River landmarks across Louisville, Kentucky.

MLB Ballparks

Every Major League Baseball ballpark, from Fenway's Green Monster to Oracle Park's McCovey Cove.

Maine State Parks

Major Airports

The forty airports that move America — one patch per terminal you actually pass through.

Maryland State Parks

Massachusetts State Parks

Memphis

Blues, soul, civil-rights history, and the Mississippi River across Memphis, Tennessee.

Mesa

Sonoran Desert peaks, ghost-town lore, and museums across Mesa, Arizona.

Miami

Experience the Magic City's beaches, art, and Cuban culture

Michigan State Parks

Milwaukee

Beer heritage, Harley history, and the Lake Michigan lakefront across Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Minneapolis

City of Lakes art, riverfront milling history, and Mississippi falls across Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Minnesota State Parks

Missions & Contact

Mississippi State Parks

Missouri

Missouri State Parks

Montana State Parks

Muffler Men

The fiberglass giants of International Fiberglass — fewer than 200 still standing.

NBA Arenas

All 30 NBA arenas, from the Garden's rafters to the Intuit Dome's Wall.

NFL Stadiums

Visit all 30 NFL stadiums across the country

NPS Natural Features

National seashores, preserves, wild rivers, lakeshores, and other natural features managed by the National Park Service.

Nashville

Experience Music City's country music heritage and vibrant scene

Natchez Trace Parkway

Four hundred and forty-four miles from Natchez to Nashville along a route worn first by animals, then by the Natchez and Chickasaw, then by boatmen walking home upriver after selling their flatboats for lumber. No commercial traffic, no billboards, and no traffic lights on any of it. Eleven stops from an eight-acre ceremonial mound to the columns of a burned mansion, by way of the house Elvis was born in.

National Monuments

Native Hawaii

Nebraska State Parks

Nevada State Parks

New England & New York

New Hampshire State Parks

New Jersey State Parks

New Mexico

New Mexico State Parks

New Orleans

Experience the Big Easy's jazz, food, and Creole culture

New York City

Explore the Big Apple and its iconic landmarks

New York State Parks

North Carolina State Parks

North Dakota State Parks

Oakland

Lake Merritt, redwood hills, and Bay-side culture across Oakland, California.

Ohio State Parks

Oklahoma

Oklahoma City

The National Memorial, Western heritage, and Bricktown across Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Oklahoma State Parks

Omaha

A world-class zoo, the Old Market, and Missouri River landmarks across Omaha, Nebraska.

Oregon State Parks

Orlando

Visit the Theme Park Capital of the World

Outlaws & Last Stands

Overseas Highway

US-1 from Miami to Key West, hopping the Florida Keys one bridge at a time on the bones of Henry Flagler's Overseas Railroad — an undertaking called impossible until it opened in 1912, and destroyed by a single hurricane in 1935. Eleven stops from the Art Deco District to the last buoy on the continent, by way of the first undersea park in the country and the only place on earth the Key deer lives.

Pacific Coast Highway

California State Route 1 — the cliff-edge drive from the redwoods north of San Francisco to the beaches of San Diego.

Pacific Northwest

Pennsylvania State Parks

Philadelphia

Discover the birthplace of American democracy

Phoenix

Explore the Valley of the Sun's desert beauty and Southwestern culture

Pittsburgh

Inclines, rivers and museums across Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Plains & Great Lakes Nations

Portland

Discover the quirky city with books, roses, and waterfalls

Rhode Island State Parks

Roadside Giants

Roadside Oddities

The genuinely inexplicable: places whose only reason to exist is that someone did it.

Roadside Statues

Commissioned civic sculpture — the monuments towns paid for and became known for.

Rocky Mountains

Sacramento

Gold Rush history, the railroad, and the state capital across Sacramento, California.

Salem

Witch trial sites, maritime history and old New England in Salem, Massachusetts.

Salt Lake City

Pioneer history, mountain canyons and the lake itself, across Salt Lake City, Utah.

San Antonio

Experience the Alamo City's rich history and River Walk culture

San Diego

Experience America's Finest City with beaches and world-class attractions

San Francisco

Discover the City by the Bay with iconic bridges and hills

San Jose

Silicon Valley tech, cultural districts, and quirky landmarks across San Jose, California.

Savannah

Explore the charm of Georgia's historic coastal gem

Seattle

Explore the Emerald City with coffee culture and stunning views

South Carolina State Parks

South Dakota State Parks

Springfield

Lincoln's hometown, the Illinois capitol and Route 66, across Springfield, Illinois.

St. Louis

Explore the Gateway City

Tampa

Theme-park thrills, cigar-city history, and the Riverwalk across Tampa, Florida.

Tennessee State Parks

Texas

Texas Hill Country

The hundred miles between Austin and San Antonio taken at the pace the hills deserve: a swimming hole under a collapsed cavern roof, a river coming down limestone steps, a president's ranch, a German market town founded in 1846, a billion-year-old granite dome that creaks as it cools, and two dance halls older than most of the roads between them.

Texas State Parks

The Carolinas & the Coast

The Chesapeake

The Eastern Theater

The Mid-Atlantic

The Midwest

The Mound Builders

The Mountain West — Utah

The Northeast

The South

The Southeast

The Southern Campaign

The Southwest

The West

The Western Theater

Trans-Mississippi

Tucson

Sonoran Desert saguaros, Spanish missions, and sky islands across Tucson, Arizona.

Tulsa

Art Deco architecture, oil-fortune museums, and Route 66 across Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Utah State Parks

Utah's Mighty 5

Vermont State Parks

Virginia Beach

Oceanfront boardwalk, the 1607 First Landing, and coastal nature across Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Virginia State Parks

Washington DC

Tour the monuments and museums of the nation's capital

Washington State Parks

West Virginia State Parks

Wisconsin State Parks

Wyoming State Parks

Zoos

A curated collection of the best and most notable zoos across the United States.

Public & Shareable Web Surfaces

Beyond the app, Scout serves a set of public, unauthenticated web pages on scout-patches.com. The marketing site and the API share one origin; the shop is a separate storefront on its own subdomain.

Shareable surfaces

Public profile (/u/<slug>) — a scout's shareable page, opened from the Profile screen's Share button. Headline stats, a grid of collected patch art with an overflow count, completed-collection trophies, and a download-the-app call to action. The slug is generated from the display name plus a short id; the page is on by default with an opt-out in Settings, and guest and opted-out profiles return 404. No personal contact details and no precise personal coordinates.
Profile link card (/u/<slug>/card.png) — an auto-generated Open Graph image titled "[Name] on Scout — N patches collected", so a shared profile unfurls into a rich preview.
Generated avatars (/api/avatar/<seed>.svg) — deterministic identicon-style avatars, so every scout has a distinct mark without uploading a photo.
Business-card redirect (/card) — the permanent destination encoded by a printed QR code; it counts scans and forwards to an admin-configurable target. QR images are served at /card/qr.svg and /card/qr.png.
Smart app link (/get) — one short link that detects the visitor's device and redirects to the right store listing, falling back to the shipped live listing when the admin config is empty. This is the link the in-app "Invite a friend" action shares.

Marketing pages

Home (/) — a single-screen hero: eyebrow, headline, lede, store badges, and hero art pairing a phone playing the unlock reveal with a macro of the real embroidered patch.
App hub (/app) — the download hub the QR code points at.
QR patch discovery (/discover/<patchId>) — the destination for a printed patch QR code: "Patch discovered — you're standing here right now."
Brand guide (/brand) — a public but unlisted, noindex brand guide for marketing and contractors, with logo downloads.

Legal and support

Terms of Service / EULA (/terms, with /eula redirecting to it) — includes the objectionable-content and abusive-user terms expected of an app with user-generated content.
Privacy policy (/privacy) — the policy referenced by both app stores. A separate policy for the Meta integration lives at /privacy-facebook.
Support (/support) — the App Store support URL, also opened from in-app Settings and the FAQ.

Machine surfaces

Map tiles — Scout self-hosts its basemap, serving vector tiles from its own backend rather than a third-party map provider. This is why the map can obey the app's theme.
Catalog sync — one unauthenticated endpoint returns the whole public catalog (categories, collections, campaigns, patches, types, memberships) with optional deltas. It strips admin-only collections and non-visible patches, so what the app sees is exactly what this page's indexes describe.
This context page (/context) — a hidden, crawlable, server-rendered product brief, not linked from anywhere in the app or the marketing site.

Commerce — How Scout Makes Money

The app is free and contains nothing paid. There is no subscription, no premium tier, and no working in-app purchase. All revenue is physical goods, sold through a separate storefront.

What is actually on sale right now

This changes, and the honest answer today is narrow. The public shopfront is behind a coming-soon wall. The catalog, Store Exclusives, collections, the cart and the general hats category are all closed to the public — verified against production, where every walled path still serves the wall page titled "The shop is in the app". Two things remain open:

The launch drop — a single limited hat, sold from its own page with a live scarcity counter. This is where paid-ad traffic points.
The in-app store — a signed-in scout can open the shop from inside the app and see the patches they have earned.

Do not write copy implying a browsable public patch catalog until the wall comes down.

The catalog behind the wall

Single iron-on patches — the core product, with free US shipping and no order threshold.
Collection sets — one bundle product per collection, sold from the collection page, gated "earned, not bought": it is only orderable once every sellable patch in the set has been collected in the app. Note for internal accuracy: the $5-a-patch bundle price is a real Shopify product price, not a cart discount, and it is live — applied to production on 2026-09-02 across 197 collection products.
Store Exclusives — collections marked open-purchase, buyable by anyone with no earning required.
Hats — one National Parks After Dark trucker cap with a variant per park. The wider hats category is switched off.
Sold-out items swap the buy button for an email-capture form.

The "earned, not bought" gate, precisely

Two separate mechanisms are often conflated:

The per-product buy gate. A patch requires unlocking unless it belongs to an open-purchase collection. A product is buyable if it does not require unlocking, or the signed-in viewer has collected it in the app. Otherwise the product page swaps the buy button for a callout headed "Earned, not bought" — visit it in person and collect it in the app to order the embroidered version. A signed-out visitor gets a sign-in prompt; a collector gets the nudge alone.
Section visibility. Three shopper states — signed out, signed in with nothing collected, and collector. Only a collector sees the Earned Patches area. Guests and members see the smaller buyable-only catalog; collectors see the full one.

Two honest caveats: the gate fails open, so a backend hiccup never wrongly bounces a real collector, and product pages are reachable by direct URL because the app deep-links straight into them — visibility filtering happens on listing surfaces. This is a purchase gate in the interface, not a cryptographic entitlement.

How the shop is built

The storefront is Scout's own, running headless against Shopify: Shopify handles checkout and fulfilment, and the catalog is deliberately unpublished from Shopify's own storefront so there is exactly one place to buy. Checkout is served from its own subdomain.

The in-app store — the richest commerce surface Scout has

A signed-in scout opens "Your Store" from inside the app and gets a shop built around what they have actually earned, not a generic catalog. It is not behind the coming-soon wall.

A field record at the top — how many patches you have earned, how many sets you have started, and how many are nearly done.
Your sets — every collection you have made progress in, shown as a card with the patches you hold, dashed placeholders for the ones you do not, and a line telling you how many more unlock the set, ordered nearest-to-done first. Internal accuracy note: a completed set now has a real "Order the set" button — not just display text — gated to scouts who own every sellable patch in it. The $5-a-patch price behind that button is live as of 2026-09-02, so a completed set checks out at patchCount × $5, not the flat $8 a single patch costs. Adding member patches individually from the grid below never gets a discount, regardless of set completion or whether the bundle price has been applied.
Promo and Swag shelves — the current featured drop, and Scout-branded merchandise: a compass logo tee, a snapback, the trail hat.
Your patches — a grid of everything you have earned, each one addable to the cart in a tap. This is the "earned, not bought" idea made literal: the shop is stocked by where you have been.

The in-app handoff

The app opens the shop in a full-screen web view from the drawer, from patch detail, and from the celebration screen. The patch-detail and celebration entrances are the "Purchase Patch" buttons, behind the buy_patch flag — which is on in production, so an ordinary scout does see them. They are not an in-app purchase: every one of them opens this web view, and the checkout happens on the web. The session is handed over securely — tokens travel in the URL fragment so they never reach server logs, are re-verified against Scout's own signing keys, and are exchanged for secure cookies before the fragment is wiped from history. It fails open: a missing or invalid token simply means browsing signed out.

Feature Status & What Scout Does NOT Have

This section exists so that anyone — or any AI agent — working from this brief does not describe something Scout cannot do. Read it before writing marketing copy, ad scripts, App Store text, or product documentation. It is reconciled against the per-feature engineering docs in docs/features/, which are written from the code itself.

Shipped and on for everyone

Polygon-containment unlock · the compass · the celebration · camera-roll retrace · the discovery map · Near Me · the patch browser · patch detail · collections and campaigns · achievements · Day Trip and Road Trip, including turn-by-turn guidance and rerouting · the local Album · community boards and the community hub · reporting, blocking and moderation · messages · referrals and invites · the 50 States and National Parks field records · the public profile and link card · the in-app store handoff.

Built but switched off, or unreachable

Describing any of these as a live feature would be wrong.

In-app purchase. A complete RevenueCat pipeline exists — backend verification, a purchases model, a configured mobile SDK, a purchase sheet — with no reachable entry point. The only trigger was a locked-collection map pin, left dead by an earlier removal. Scout has no working in-app purchase and no subscription of any kind.
Digital collection unlocks on the map. Nothing is sold that way any more. No pin can render a locked state; the paywall map is permanently empty by construction.
Cloud photo backup — fully built, and off for every scout today. The cloud_album master switch is on in production, but that switch only opens the door: an account also needs an explicit per-account grant before a single photo is uploaded, and no grant has been handed out. The effective state is that nobody's photos leave their phone. Never describe Scout as backing photos up, and never write copy that depends on it, unless someone confirms the grants have started.
"Continue as guest" — the entry point is behind guest_mode, which ships off. Guest sessions work; whether the button is visible depends on a live flag value.
Type-specific patch tabs — 28 place types have finished tab components built. Exactly one, the Battle tab, is reachable. Never describe Scout as having rich per-type pages for every kind of place.
Submit a Patch — behind a flag that ships off.
The Hats storefront category — hardcoded off.
Password sign-in — implemented, but the form only renders in development and test builds. It is not a production sign-in method.

Things Scout does NOT have — do not describe these as features

There is no "Master Patch," and completing a collection awards nothing. Verified against the achievement rules: they key off place type and counts, never off a collection or campaign id. Completion flips a display boolean — a checkmark, a tally, a completion band. Nothing is granted. Older marketing copy referenced a Master Patch; that copy is wrong.
There is no photo-based location verification. That flow was removed entirely and nothing replaced it. Landmarks are earned by containment or by camera-roll import.
There are no remote push notifications. Verified by a repo-wide search: no push-token registration exists at all. The only notification a device shows is a local one fired on unlock, respecting the Settings toggle. The "Push Notifications" setting does not subscribe you to anything remote.
Do not advertise a proximity radius. Never write "within 100 metres", "within X feet", "get close to", or "near it". The mechanic is being inside a real boundary — an E2E test parks a device 284m outside a zoo and asserts it stays uncollected. Precision, for internal accuracy only: a patch that has no polygon at all falls back to a small radius, and the manual "Check In" button for city and state patches compares place names rather than geometry. Neither is a radius worth advertising, and neither changes the rule for anything with a boundary.
Achievements cannot be earned from imported photos. Only patches collected by being there in person count. Importing a camera roll and unlocking a whole map's worth of patches earns zero achievement progress — a deliberate product rule.
Achievements are not tiered and are never revoked, and "Wild Cards" are not hidden: every achievement, including the Wild Card family, is sent to the app in full at all times. Wild Card is a label, not a secret.
There is no subscription, premium tier, or working in-app purchase. The app is free end to end.
There is no in-app tutorial. Onboarding is two permission screens. There is no "replay tutorial".
There is no light mode and no user-selectable theme. Scout is dark-only by design.
Video is not supported in camera-roll import. Photos only.
There is no offline map pack, and Scout is not offline-first. Unlocking requires a network round trip, because containment is answered by the server; offline, the app cannot discover new content and does not queue the unlock check.
The catalog search is not a server-side search. The whole catalog downloads to the device and every filter and search runs locally. There is no search endpoint and no full-text index.
Messages are not direct messaging, are not pushed or streamed, and cannot be targeted at a segment — every published message goes to every signed-in user.
There is no home-screen floating action button and no user-customisable FAB.

Known limits worth stating plainly

Trips now sync across devices for signed-in accounts, and support turn-by-turn guidance and rerouting. What they still do not do: no editing after creation (delete and replan), no scheduling, and one live day trip at a time. Road-trip routing is global, but the stop-finder only covers the United States, so a route outside the US returns no stops.
Removing a patch from your collection removes ownership only. Published photos, posts, comments, and any achievement it contributed to all survive.
Community posts are not anonymous, and a handle cannot be changed. Every scout carries a permanent handle — the name shown on posts, comments, photos and the public profile, and the thing @-mentions resolve against. It is derived once from the email address at signup and there is no editor, no endpoint and no setting that changes it. Scout has usernames; it does not have editable usernames, so never promise a scout they can pick or change their name.
Nothing rate-limits community posting, voting, or reporting, and the pre-publication text filter is deliberately narrow — a fixed list of slurs and explicit solicitation, nothing else. Everything else relies on report → review → removal.
Collection-set pricing: both the gate and the price are live. Every sellable collection's bundle product is gated to scouts who have earned it, and production Shopify was repriced from its long-standing flat $8 to patchCount × $5 on 2026-09-02 (197 products, 0 failures). "$5 a patch" is now a true claim and may be advertised, as are "earned, not bought" and "unlock the whole set once you've collected it". Two exclusions remain by decision, not oversight: the fourteen store-exclusive packs are still a flat $8 regardless of size, and the fourteen packs aside, every sellable collection is now priced by size.

Internal only — never public

Scout runs an admin application for content authoring, publishing, moderation, analytics, and store operations, plus an offline geospatial pipeline that produces the boundary polygons. Neither is a user-facing feature and neither should appear in any public description of the product.

Brand & Visual Identity

Scout uses a single fixed dark theme called the "field-guide" palette — there is no light mode and no user-selectable theme. The aesthetic is deliberately earthy, analog, and tactile: a dark near-black canvas evoking aged paper or leather, brass/gold as the primary accent, and serif headlines in Fraunces paired with tight sans-serif utility text in Inter Tight. The visual language draws from vintage field guides, cartographic instruments, and expedition gear — compasses, embossed brass hardware, worn canvas.

The logo is the Field Rose: a brass compass rose on field-guide black, generated from code so the icon and wordmark cannot drift apart. Its palette is taken directly from the app's own tokens, and the wordmark sets Fraunces SemiBold with deliberately opened-up letter-spacing.

Key tokens from mobile/src/theme/:

Surface: canvas #0D0B09 (deepest, near-black with a warm cast) · base #14110D (screen background) · raised #1C1813 (cards) · elevated #251F18 (modals and sheets) · silhouette #0A0805 (the locked patch silhouette).
Text: primary #F7EEDD (warm off-white, like aged paper) · secondary #C9BDA6 · tertiary #8A7F6C · quaternary #5C5446 · onAccent #2A1A05 (ink on brass).
Accent (brass): primary #E8B86A (pins, CTAs, the compass needle, active states) · high #F4CC7E · soft #B89255 · deep #6B4F24, plus a glow and a border tint derived from the same brass.
State: locked / ember #D6663A · collected / moss #6E8C5A · uncollected also #D6663A — a deliberate alias kept under its own name, because "locked" means a collection you have not bought and "uncollected" means a patch you have not earned. Plus destructive, info, and warning states.
Borders are warm, not neutral grey: subtle rgba(255,220,160,0.06) and strong rgba(255,220,160,0.10). Strokes drawn over photography use white instead, since only white survives every exposure.
Glass — the chrome floating over maps and imagery, platform-branched because Android has no backdrop blur.
Map: user location #E8B86A, collected pin #6E8C5A, uncollected pin #D6663A.
Narrative palettes — per-context sets used by specific surfaces: a Union/Confederate pair for the Civil War Battle tab, a phosphorescent moon palette for haunted places, and a compass progression running brass to ember to moss as you close in.
Typography: display and headlines in Fraunces SemiBold (patch names, screen titles, hero numbers), quotes in Fraunces Regular Italic, body and utility text in Inter Tight at Regular / Medium / SemiBold / Bold. The signature is tight negative letter-spacing on the Fraunces display sizes and very wide positive letter-spacing on the uppercase Inter Tight eyebrow labels.
Spacing steps 8 / 12 / 16 / 22 / 26 / 32; radii 10 / 18 / 28 / pill.
Gold CTA button: a three-stop gradient #F4CC7E → #E8B86A → #C89446 with a gloss highlight and dark-brown text.

Tone & Messaging Guidance

Scout's voice is that of a knowledgeable companion who has actually been to these places — unhurried, specific, and quietly proud of the work that went into the catalog. It is adventurous but not hypey; the reward is the place itself and the history behind it, not a dopamine streak. The app treats the user as someone who appreciates well-sourced detail, not someone who needs to be sold to. "Earned, not bought" describes the emotional register: you collect a patch by showing up, and showing up is the point.

Confirmed live copy on the scout-patches.com home page:

"The field guide to the real world" — the hero eyebrow
"Go see the world. Earn the patch. Keep the journey." — the headline, set on three lines with the last italicised
"Scout turns real travel into a collection. Visit a place in person to earn its patch, then carry home an embroidered reminder of where you've been." — the lede
"Free & no account needed" — the line beneath the store badges

Other confirmed brand lines:

"Earn the patch. Keep the journey." — the tagline
"Your road trip now has a scoreboard you can only fill by being there." — the one-liner
"You can't buy it. You have to go."
"Scout turns real travel into a collection you earn by showing up — visit a place in person to unlock its patch."

In-app copy examples:

"Find what's waiting nearby." — home empty state when location permission is off
"No patches within reach—yet." — home empty state when you are between patches
"No posts yet — start the conversation." — community empty state
"Eyes on the road — patches collect themselves as you pass" — the road-trip driving console
"Nobody has mapped {city} yet." — the empty day-trip hero

Phrases that fit the Scout voice: "places worth the detour," "collect what you've seen," "the patch is proof you were there," "plan the route, earn the patch," "the catalog of everywhere," "history at the ground level."

Hard rules about the unlock mechanic. Say "the patch unlocks when you step inside the real boundary of the place" or "you have to actually be inside the park." Never use radius language — no "within 100m", no "within X feet", no "get close to", no "near it". There is no radius.

Phrases to avoid: "AI-powered," "gamified," "seamless," "robust," "ecosystem," "synergy," generic app-store boilerplate ("This app will change the way you travel"), and any language that makes it sound like a social network or a points race. Scout is not about competing with others or chasing streaks — it is about going to places. Avoid exclamation spam; let the mechanic do the bragging.

An ideal Scout ad follows this arc: a person sets out — car packed, map open, somewhere specific in mind, maybe a trailhead sign or a Civil War marker on a two-lane road. They arrive at the exact location: standing there, looking at the real thing. The compass reads that they are inside, the unlock celebration fires on their phone, and the patch artwork blooms into colour. The feeling is quiet pride, not triumph: proof I was there. A 15–60 second video built around setting out, arriving, and unlocking tells the whole Scout story without a word of explanation.