Scarab

Scarab

A calm read on any city.

Give Scarab a city and your dates. It tells you how calm the city is for those dates: one number, and a few plain sentences about the place itself, with anything real that is happening said in proportion.

Coming to iPhone How it works
0 to 10One scale, every kind of danger
31 daysToday and the month ahead
7 citiesIn one search
10 readsFree, then a pass or a plan
01The card

The place first. Then the number's reasons.

A card opens with the city as it is on your dates: the festival, the season, the water it stands on. The number sits above it. Anything real that is happening sits beneath, each line naming what produced it.

Lisbon
11 TO 14 JUN · 3 NIGHTS
1.8
24° warm, clear

Saint Anthony's Day falls on 13 June, and on the night before, Lisbon's neighbourhoods parade in the Marchas Populares, teams in handmade costumes marching and dancing to popular music, while people party in the streets with grilled sardines and beer.

Lisbon lies on the Atlantic at the mouth of the Tagus, along the river's north shore, in the west of the Iberian Peninsula.

Read on 5 Jun

Illustrative card. The words are Scarab's own almanac lines for Lisbon.

How to read it

  • The number

    A zero means nothing Scarab can see rises above the ordinary. Ten is the far end of what the world produces. A 7 from a flood and a 7 from a war mean the same thing to the person standing there, because every kind of danger is measured on one scale.

  • The colour

    The screen follows the number: near-white for deep calm, then green, yellow, orange, and a red that says so plainly.

  • The words

    The city itself comes first. Beneath it, each line that moved the number says what it is, how serious, and which way it is heading. Scarab never says a place is safe, and it says nothing rather than guessing.

  • The date

    Every card carries the day it was read. A saved card keeps its reading for seven days, so you always know how old it is.

Most of the world, most of the time, reads low. That is not a failure of drama. It is the point.

02What it measures

Each kind of danger, separately, for one thing only.

How likely it is to kill or seriously hurt a person who is simply there. Each is measured against published science, on one shared 0 to 10 scale. The city's number is the single worst of those measurements, never an average.

  • Heat, cold and air

    Measured on the body, not the map: the temperature it feels like, the air you breathe, the height of the city.

  • Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, storms

    Read where the city actually stands, from the world's monitoring networks, for the days you are there.

  • Wildfire, landslides and avalanches

    The fire front and the smoke that travels further; the slope after rain; the snowpack and the routes it closes.

  • Disease outbreaks

    Only where a health authority's own declaration reaches the city. A country's tier never places an outbreak on a city.

  • War

    Armed conflict, scored on documented events, never on whose side of a map a city sits.

  • Chronic violent crime

    The measured rate at which a person present comes to serious harm, from national statistics. Where nothing is measured, Scarab says nothing.

03The stance

Leans toward caution. Says nothing rather than guessing.

  • Plainly

    When something is genuinely dangerous, it says so. A protest is a protest. No euphemism, and no drama either.

  • Honestly

    When it cannot measure a danger for a city, it says nothing rather than guessing, and it tells you when local detail is thin.

  • Never

    Scarab never says a place is safe. A low reading means the conditions it can see are quiet, not that nothing can happen.

  • Privately

    There are no accounts, and nothing is tracked. Your searches and saved places stay on your phone.

  • Advice

    Scarab is situational awareness, not official advice. Always check your government's travel advisory.

04What it costs

Ten reads free. Then a pass, or a plan.

Ten free readsOnce per device, no account needed. A read is one city for one set of dates.
A passThirty days of reads, bought once. It ends when it ends and never renews on its own.
A planRenews until you cancel in your Apple Account settings. Prices are shown in the App Store.

Purchases are made through the App Store and charged to your Apple Account. We never see your name or your payment details.

How calm is it, really?

That is the question a traveller actually has. Scarab exists to answer it, and to be believable when it does.

How Scarab works Teams and API