Place is the unit
Conversations belong to where they happen. mapdap zones are geohash-bounded, not friend-graph-bounded — you talk to the people actually around you.
About mapdap
The internet forgot where you are. We're putting it back.
mapdap is a hyperlocal chat app for iOS. Built by a small team in Tallinn, shipping city by city, run from a small office above a bakery. No ads, no follower graph, no growth-hack feed — just a map of conversations happening near you, and a tap to join them.
Why mapdap exists
Every social feed today is the same shape: a global stream of strangers, filtered by an algorithm, rewarding the loudest voices. It does almost nothing for the people standing on the same street as you.
We're not trying to be everyone's app. We're trying to be your block's app.
We thought there should be a social layer that feels like the place you're in. The block, the street, the neighborhood — that's the unit. So we built one.
Principles
01–04 / how we build mapdapReal beats followed
No follower counts. No virality math. The signal that matters is: are you here, now? If yes, you're part of the conversation.
Privacy by design
Your location anchors conversations to a zone — never streamed to other users. You decide what your profile shows. Block or report anyone, any time.
Built city by city
We don't drop a global app and call it done. mapdap rolls out one city at a time, with curated launches and active moderation from day one.
Leadership
Leadership
Built by two engineers obsessed with making the local world feel close.
Abdalla Edres
Chief Executive Officer
Founded mapdap in 2025 after a decade of building social products at Facebook, X, and a couple of indie startups. Writes the iOS app most days, the policy docs the rest.
XLinkedInGitHub
Fahed Elahmad
Chief Technology Officer
Builds the gateway, the realtime stack, and most of the infra. Came from a streaming-media engineering team — knows what scaling sockets actually costs at 3 a.m.
GitHubLinkedIn
Headquarters
A bakery, two laptops, a city.
We work out of a one-room office in Telliskivi, Tallinn — same street as the launch zone for the Estonia rollout. No remote-first manifesto, no fancy hybrid policy. Just two people who can walk to the bakery downstairs and ship.
Roadmap
Public beta — iOS, Tallinn + Dubai
mapdap goes live in two cities on opposite sides of the planet to prove the city-by-city rollout works.
Expansion to 11 cities
London · Lisbon · Istanbul · Cairo · Amsterdam · Riyadh · Berlin · Madrid · Tokyo. The marquee on the home page is real.
Android beta
Android shipping on Play Store. Same backend, same zones, same chats — just a second client.
Real-time city events
Concerts · transit · weather · everything happening in a city right now, rendered on the map alongside the chat.