Beacon iOS App

A native iOS app for finding restaurants, cafés and hotels around you using the Geoapify Places API, rating the places you visit, and keeping those ratings locally with SwiftData. Built with Swift and SwiftUI following an MVVM architecture. The app UI is in Norwegian.

Background

Originally built as the exam project for iOS Programming (15 ECTS), Kristiania University College, graded B.

All code is handwritten. AI is only used to help write the README and commit messages.

Features

• Explore: nearby places on an interactive map with custom pins, or in a list view, toggled with one button
• Search: search places by name, debounced 300 ms so typing doesn't spam the API
• Filter: pick a category (restaurant, hotel, café) and a search radius from 1 km to 10 km
• Sort: by distance, alphabetically, by highest average rating, or show only places you've rated
• Rate: give a place 1–5 stars; every rating is stored with a date and shown as a partially filled average star
• My Places: your saved places with their average rating and full rating history
• Details: address, opening hours, phone, email and website, plus a link that opens the place in Apple Maps
• GPS button, animated category illustrations, pull to refresh, loading and empty states

Tech Stack

Layer	Tools
Language	Swift
UI	SwiftUI
Maps	MapKit
Location	CoreLocation
Networking	URLSession, Codable
Local storage	SwiftData
Reactive	Combine (debounced search)
Architecture	MVVM (View → ViewModel → API/SwiftData)

Architecture

Models/            Decodable API models + SwiftData @Model types
ViewModels/        Location tracking, debounced search
Views/ExploreTab/  Map view, list view, and the shared parent view
Views/MyPlacesTab/ Saved places and rating history
Views/Components/  Place details sheet, average star rating
Views/Animations/  Per-category animated illustrations
Modifiers/         Shared button and heading styling

SavedPlace and Rating are related with a cascading delete rule, so deleting a place removes its ratings.

Getting Started

Requirements: Xcode 26 or newer, iOS 26.0 deployment target.

git clone git@github.com:AnnikenJE/beacon.git
cd beacon

The API key is not checked in (**/APIKey.swift is git-ignored). Get a free key at geoapify.com, then copy the template and fill in your key:

cp Beacon/APIKey.example.swift Beacon/APIKey.swift

enum APIKey {
    static let geoapifyAPIKey = "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
}

Add Beacon/APIKey.swift to the Beacon target in Xcode so it gets compiled.

Open Beacon.xcodeproj in Xcode and run on a simulator or device. The app asks for "when in use" location access the first time you use the GPS button.