Some Cows
For iPhone, iPad and Android

Saw some cows?Pin it. Forever.

Some Cows turns the oldest game in the back seat into a real, shared map. Press and hold where you saw them and the spot is marked, for you and for every other spotter on the road. One gesture, one thump of haptic feedback, done in under a second.

  • No account needed
  • No ads
  • No tracking
  • Works with no signal
An illustration of the map. The real thing sits on top of Apple Maps and Google Maps.

Three seconds, start to finish

Cow spotting happens at 60 miles an hour. Some Cows is built around that one hard constraint: if marking a sighting takes a form, a photo and two taps, the cows are gone before you finish.

  1. Open the map

    No sign up and no email address. You agree once not to use it while driving, you get an anonymous identity, and the shared map is already loaded with what other spotters have found around you.

  2. Press and hold the spot

    The pin lands exactly where your finger was, not where the map happens to be centred, and the camera never jumps. You feel a solid haptic thump so you know it worked without looking. In a hurry, one tap of the Cow here! button drops at your GPS position instead.

  3. Change your mind for four seconds

    An Undo button sits at the bottom of the screen for a moment after every drop, and pulls the pin straight back off the shared map. Nothing to confirm, nothing to regret.

Everyone spots on the same map

Your pins are not a private diary. The moment a sighting saves, it is on the map for every other spotter, and theirs are on yours. That is what makes a road you have driven a hundred times suddenly interesting.

Find Cows

One tap asks for the nearest sightings and flies the map to the closest one. Handy when you are in an unfamiliar county and want to know whether anyone has been spotting here at all.

I saw cows here too

Open somebody else's pin and confirm it, as long as you are within a mile. Confirmations are counted per person, so a pin that says nine spotters have seen cows here is a genuinely reliable pasture.

Honest pins only

You can browse the entire world, but a sighting has to be dropped within five miles of where you really are. Drop within 500 feet of an existing pin and the app hands you that pin to confirm instead of letting the map fill with duplicates.

No signal, no problem

The best cow country has the worst coverage. Sightings and check-ins made in a dead zone are saved on the device, stay visible on your map even after a relaunch, and upload themselves the moment a bar comes back.

Share the actual cow

Snap a photo and Some Cows builds a share card on your phone, your image over a Some Cows banner with the animal you spotted. It goes straight to Messages or wherever you like. The photo is never uploaded to us.

Made bigger for the back seat

On iPad every control grows, because the person doing the spotting is usually the smallest passenger. On iPhone and iPad every control carries a proper accessibility label for VoiceOver.

It is not just cows, and it does keep score

Eleven field guide slots, and the greyed out ones are the reason somebody in your car will start shouting about a llama.

  • 🐄 Cow
  • 🐑 Sheep
  • 🐎 Horse
  • 🐐 Goat
  • 🐖 Pig
  • 🦙 Llama
  • 🫏 Donkey
  • 🐔 Chicken
  • 🦫 Beaver
  • 🐫 Camel
  • 🐾 Other

The field guide fills itself in

Every animal you spot lights up its slot with a lifetime count. The ones you have never seen sit there in grey with a question mark, which turns out to be a remarkably effective way to make a family detour for a camel.

The guide also holds your lifetime sightings, your check-ins, and two separate streaks: consecutive days and consecutive weeks, plus your longest daily run on record. Streaks are counted in your own time zone, so a late night sighting on a road trip counts for the day you actually spotted it.

A small streak chip rides along the top of the map, and turns orange when today has not been spotted yet.

A fresh bingo card every month

Nine goals in a three by three grid, and everybody in the world gets the same card for the same month. That is the point: you can compare notes with a friend three states away.

Goals are mixed from easy to hard, so the card is always winnable but never a walkover. Spot three animals. Spot something on a weekend. Get two sightings in one day. Check in at somebody else's pin. Complete a trip. Log sightings in two different regions. Find a pig, a llama, a donkey.

Complete a row, a column or a diagonal and that is a bingo. Fill all nine and you have a blackout, which almost certainly means you took the long way home on purpose.

Turn the drive itself into the record

Tap Start a Trip as you pull out of the driveway and every sighting you drop is attached to that drive, with a live count across the top of the map.

End the trip and you get a summary worth keeping: how long you were out, how far your sightings stretched in miles, and the full species breakdown, animal by animal.

Flip a trip to public and it gets a link anyone can open in a browser, no app required. It unfurls properly in Messages and group chats, which is how most people end up hearing about Some Cows in the first place.

  • 1h 24mTime out spotting
  • 38.6 miDistance covered by your sightings
  • 🐄 17Cows on this trip
  • 🐎 4  🐑 6And everything else

An example trip summary. Yours will have more cows.

Spotting is better as a herd

Some Cows has a proper social layer, and none of it is required. Stay anonymous forever if you like, or pick a username and start a rivalry.

Three leaderboards

Global for the truly committed, Friends for the people you actually know, and Regions so you can be the undisputed champion of your own state without competing with the entire world.

Follow other spotters

Add a friend by username to compare on the Friends board and see the trips they record. No contact list upload, no friend suggestions, no social graph mining.

Private herds

Start a herd, name it after your family or your carpool, and share the eight character invite code. Members see each other's trips in a shared activity feed. The code uses an alphabet with no confusable characters, so it survives being read aloud in a moving car.

An activity feed

Trips from the people you follow and the herds you belong to, newest first, with the species breakdown and distance right there in the row. Tap through for the full summary.

Every sighting has a web page

Share any pin and the recipient gets a real page with the animal, who spotted it and how many others confirmed it. It works in any browser, which makes it very easy to say look, cows, in the field we both know.

A tip jar, and that is all

If the app makes your drives better you can buy the herd some hay, which puts a wheat badge beside your name on the leaderboard. It unlocks nothing. No feature in Some Cows is behind a paywall.

Deliberately boring about your data

Some Cows is a small app from a small company. It does not have an advertising business, so it has no reason to know anything about you.

  • No account required. Anonymous from the first launch, with a random per-install identifier and nothing else.
  • Sign in asks for nothing. Sign in with Apple and Google sign in are used purely as a stable identifier. No name and no email address is ever stored.
  • Your photos never leave your phone. Share cards are composed on the device and handed to the system share sheet.
  • No ads and no third party analytics SDKs. Nothing about you is sold or shared onward.
  • Location is only needed to drop or confirm. Browsing the map does not require it at all.
  • You can delete everything. Delete My Data removes your sightings from the shared map for good and resets the app. Your Apple or Google account is untouched.
  • You own your own pins. Even fully anonymous, the device keeps a key for each pin it created, so you can always delete your own work.

Safety is not an afterthought

There is zero tolerance for objectionable content or abusive users. Any pin can be reported or its author blocked, from the pin itself, in two taps. Blocked spotters disappear from your map entirely, and a pin reported by three different people is hidden automatically rather than waiting on a human to get to it.

Please do not use Some Cows while driving

The app asks you to agree to exactly this before it will open, and it is not boilerplate. Pull over and park, or hand the phone to a passenger. The cows will still be there.

Questions people actually ask

What is Some Cows?

Some Cows is a shared map of animal sightings. When you see some cows you press and hold the map at the spot, and a pin lands there. Every sighting anyone drops appears on the same map, so you can see what has been spotted near you or anywhere you are travelling.

Do I need an account?

No. The app works fully anonymously the moment you open it. Signing in with Apple or Google is optional, and only adds a public username, leaderboard placement and the ability to keep your sightings when you change devices. Signing in stores no name and no email address.

Can I drop a pin anywhere on the map?

You can browse the whole world, but you can only drop a sighting within five miles of where you actually are. If a pin already exists within about 500 feet, the app opens that pin so you can confirm it instead of creating a duplicate. Confirming somebody else's pin requires being within a mile of it.

Does it work without a cell signal?

Yes, and this got real attention, because rural roads are exactly where the cows are. Sightings and check-ins made with no signal are saved on the device and upload themselves as soon as coverage returns, even if you close the app in between. Your pending pins stay visible on the map, and the last sightings and stats the app loaded are cached so a dead zone launch still shows you something.

What animals can I spot besides cows?

Eleven field guide slots: cow, sheep, horse, goat, pig, llama, donkey, chicken, beaver, camel, and a catch-all Other. Pick what you are spotting from the row of animal buttons before you drop the pin.

Is it good for kids on a road trip?

It is built for it. Dropping a sighting is a single press and hold with a haptic thump and no forms to fill in, and on iPad the controls grow larger so a kid in the back seat can read and tap them. The field guide, the streaks and the monthly bingo card give younger spotters something to chase. Please do not use the app while you are driving.

Do my photos get uploaded?

No. When you share a photo of a sighting, the card is composed on your own device and handed straight to your phone's share sheet. The photo never reaches the Some Cows servers, so nobody there can see it, store it or moderate it.

How do I delete my data?

Open Account, then Delete My Data. It permanently removes your sightings from the shared map for everyone, unlinks your sign in, and resets the app to a fresh anonymous identity. Your Apple or Google account itself is not affected. Signing out is separate and deletes nothing: your username and sightings come back when you sign in again.

Are there ads?

No ads, no third party analytics SDKs and no tracking. There is an optional tip jar that puts a wheat badge next to your name on the leaderboard, and it unlocks nothing at all. Every feature is available to everybody.

Is Some Cows on Android as well as iPhone?

Both, and they are the same app. iPhone and iPad on the App Store, Android on Google Play, sharing one backend and one map. An iPhone spotter and an Android spotter can follow each other, share a herd and appear on the same leaderboard.

The Some Cows app icon, a cow standing in a green field under a blue sky.

There are cows out there right now

Somebody is going to pin the pasture at the end of your road. It may as well be you.

  • iPhone
  • iPad
  • Android
  • No account needed
  • No ads