What Skipper is

Skipper is a narrated audio driving tour for iPhone. You mount your phone, start it, and drive. As you come near somewhere with a story, a corny old tour guide tells you what happened there, timed so the tale about the bay lands while you can still see the bay. There is nothing to look at and nothing to tap.

Where does it work right now?

Lake Tahoe, California, and nowhere else yet. There are more than 300 narrated stops around the basin. Every one is researched and recorded for a specific place, which is the reason coverage grows slowly and the reason it is worth having at all.

Outside Tahoe the app will tell you honestly that it doesn't know those roads. That is the designed behaviour, not a failure. More regions are the plan; there is no date to promise, and we would rather ship one place done properly than a nationwide map of nothing much.

What does it cost?

The app is free, and so is planning. You can talk to the Skipper about where you're going as long as you like, and change your mind as often as you like, without spending anything. Building a drive spends one of a set of free credits, because building one does real work. There is no subscription, there are no ads, and there is nothing to buy inside the app today.

Do I need an account?

Not to listen, and not to plan. With no account at all you can hear the Skipper, tell him where you'd like to drive, and hear a real clip from the route he comes back with. You only need a free account at the last step, to build and save the drive, because a saved drive belongs to somebody.

Does it work without a phone signal?

Yes, if you download a drive first. Mountain roads have real dead zones, so a downloaded drive plays entirely from your phone with no bars required.

Where do the facts come from?

Public, citable sources, principally Wikipedia, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0, with places identified through Wikidata. Every stop carries its own source and licence, one tap away in the app, and the full list lives under Settings.

Where the record is thin, the Skipper says so and lets the view do the talking. A guide who doesn't know is better than a guide who invents, and that rule is enforced in the pipeline rather than left to good intentions: a place without enough sourced material is downgraded to scenery instead of being given a story it hasn't earned.

Is it safe to use while driving?

It is built to be heard, not watched: audio-first, lock-screen controls, and it works from a mount or over Bluetooth. That said, the honest answer is the same as for anything else in a car. Mount your phone, start the drive, and keep your eyes where they belong. No story is worth it.

What do I need?

An iPhone. Skipper is iOS-only, and it isn't in the App Store yet. This page and the front door are where it lives until it is. When it ships it'll be a US release first. It uses your location only while you're on a drive, to time the stories, never in the background. Details are in the privacy policy.

Something not answered here?

Support covers what to do when something isn't working. Anything else, email hello@skipper.fm and the person who built it will read it.