StayCool: Walk in the Shade

Stay Cool finds the shadier side of any street. It’s a walking-route app for the warming planet, built around a simple idea: most of the day, the cool side of the street is already decided. You just have to know which side it is. ———— THE SHADE, AS DATA Stay Cool models every building footprint and height in 50+ cities. It casts shadows against the sun’s live position and routes you along the shaded segments of the sidewalk, switching sides mid-block where it actually helps. Cities are baked at the borough or district level for the dense ones — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island each get their own routing graph. Plus Brooklyn-specific blocks. Plus LA, SF, Chicago, DC, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Miami, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Madrid, Lisbon, Toronto, Vancouver, and a long tail of secondary cities. ———— AMBIENTSHADE · NEW A Lock Screen Live Activity that auto-appears when you start walking outdoors on a hot day. It quietly shows you which side of the street is the cool one — without you opening the app, without pinging you, without interrupting anything. Ends when you stop walking. Behind it: HealthKit step detection, Significant Location Change deliveries, and seven gating conditions designed so it fires when it’s useful and stays silent the rest of the time. Battery cost: under 2% per hour of an active session. ———— WHAT’S FREE — Shade-aware routing in every supported city — Today’s shade truth: where the cool side is, right now — Walk history and your daily streak — Saved routes for the walks you do every day — AmbientShade Lock Screen Activities (when enabled) ———— WHAT’S PRO · $1.99/MO OR $10.99/YR — Tomorrow morning’s shade forecast (plan your walk before you leave) — Curated Shaded Route of the Week — a hand-picked walk in your city, weekly — No banner ads Both tiers: same routing engine, same data quality, same shade math. Pro is the planning layer, not the routing layer. ———— ABOUT SIGN-IN Native Sign in with Apple. Native Sign in with Google. Email + password if you prefer. All three work as in-app sheets — you never leave Stay Cool to authenticate. ———— ABOUT PRIVACY Your walks stay on your device except for the routing query itself (start point + destination, no identifiers). No ad-tech SDKs. No analytics that fingerprint. We never sell, share, or monetize your location. ———— ABOUT THE PERSON WHO MADE THIS Built solo over eight months. One person, one AI partner, no team, no investors. The whole stack — the building data, the routing engine, the iOS app, the field-notes editorial — came out of that back-and-forth. If you walk a city in summer, try Stay Cool on one walk. If the cool side surprises you, you’ll know. walkintheshade.com ———— Terms of Use: https://walkintheshade.com/terms Privacy Policy: https://walkintheshade.com/privacy