What's new in Stampie: August 2026
A new Explore tab, four new collections, flags on your passport, country maps for Germany and Japan, a shop for posters and gift cards, and a smoother app all round.
Welcome back to What's new in Stampie. July was about collecting more things: cities, states, national parks. August kept that going with four new collections, and spent the rest of the month on the app around them, which is now quicker, prettier, and a bit more fun to poke around in.
Stampie, day or night 🌙
Dark mode arrived at the end of July, and August was spent finishing it properly. Every screen, not just the main ones: your share cards, stamp details, the maps, right down to the sign-in screen. Adding stamps in bed at midnight shouldn't feel like someone turned the lights on.
You'll find Theme in Settings, with light, dark, or just follow whatever your phone is doing. Switching is instant, so it's worth a try even if you're a daylight person.
A new Explore tab 🧭
Until now, finding something new to collect meant knowing what to look for. That's a bit backwards for an app about travel, so we built Explore.
It surfaces what's happening across Stampie: the stamps that were just added, the ones people are collecting most right now, and hand-picked collections with a bit of editorial behind them. Instead of searching for a place you already had in mind, you can wander and find something you didn't.
It's also the first place you can see what everyone else is up to. The most collected stamps right now are usually somewhere you hadn't thought of, and that's the point.
Four new collections
Explore is more useful when there's more to find, so we spent August filling the catalog. Four new sets landed:
Capital Cities. All 248 of them, from Reykjavik to Wellington. Some are the obvious answer and some are the one everybody gets wrong in the pub quiz, and there's a particular satisfaction in ticking off a capital you only passed through on the way somewhere else.
German States. All 16, each shaped like the real state. If you've done more of Germany than Berlin and Munich, this is where it shows.
Japan Prefectures. All 47, from Hokkaido's snow to Okinawa's beaches. This one turns a trip to Japan into something you can actually map.
NYC Boroughs. Five stamps for the five boroughs, because "I've been to New York" usually means Manhattan and we thought Queens deserved better.
Capital Cities is free for everyone. The German states, Japan prefectures and NYC boroughs sets come with Pro, like the other specialty collections.
And you don't need the app to start. There are free interactive checklists right here on the blog for the German states, the Japan prefectures and the NYC boroughs, with your progress saved on your device.
Flags on your passport 🚩
Your profile now shows the flags of everywhere you've been, lined up in a row. It's a small thing that turned out to be the first thing most people look at, and it makes a profile feel like yours at a glance rather than after reading the numbers.
Flags work like the rest of your stamp collections now, too. Collect a country's stamp and its flag lights up on its own, so there's no separate list to keep up to date. One more thing filling in as you go.
Two more maps: Germany and Japan
The world map got company in July with the United States. August added two more.
Germany, all 16 states, filling in as you collect them. And Japan, all 47 prefectures. Most trips to Japan cover three or four of them, so there's usually a lot of map left to fill.
Both work the same way as the U.S. map: pinch to zoom, pan around, watch them colour in.
A shop, for the things worth keeping 🖼️
Stampie now has a shop. It's the newest corner of the app and the one we're most curious to hear about, so we're building it up slowly, a piece at a time. Two things in it so far, both made from your own travels:
- Personalized travel world map poster. Your visited countries, highlighted on a clean map, ready to print and hang.
- Personalized travel stamp poster. Your countries as a wall of stamps, which reads a lot more like a keepsake than a data visualisation.
Both pull straight from the places you've already collected, so there's no re-entering anything. There are also Stampie Pro gift cards, delivered instantly as a code, for the traveler in your life who does not need another passport cover.
A little smoother
More people join Stampie every day, and we add new stamps every week. Both are lovely problems, and both mean there's more for the app to carry around than there was a few months ago.
So we spent part of August on the quiet work. Nothing you'll see in a screenshot, and nothing dramatic. Just a little less waiting, in the places you pass through most, and a passport that still looks right when you're somewhere with no signal. It's the kind of thing we'll keep chipping away at as we grow.
Plus the usual polish
Widgets behave themselves on both iOS and Android. Search finds what you meant, including country names in your own language. Trips no longer land on the wrong day if you added them from another timezone. And a long list of small fixes that individually are nothing and together are the difference between an app that feels finished and one that doesn't.
What's next
More maps, more collections, and grouped stamps which is the major update we're currently working on it's experience design.
Got an idea, a feature you're missing, or a rough edge that bugs you? Drop us a line at info@stampie.app. We read every one.
Behind Stampie
The idea for Stampie started in Peru 🇵🇪, back in 2023. I’ve always loved collecting passport stamps, that small thrill of seeing a new one land at the border. On that trip they just waved me through. No stamp. A small thing, but it stuck with me.
Turns out a lot of countries have quietly stopped stamping. A couple of years later I built the first version of Stampie for a hackathon, somewhere to keep that little ritual alive even when the ink doesn’t come. A passport-style journal for anyone who still wants this souvenir from every trip.
It quietly found its way to people. As an indie team, we keep working on Stampie in coffee breaks, on weekends, and from wherever the next trip takes us.
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How this post was made: AI-assisted tools may be used in research, drafting and image generation, then reviewed and edited by the author. Travel policies change quickly. For visa, border, and entry requirements, please check primary sources (official immigration sites, your embassy) before you go.
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