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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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