One of the most inspiring aspects of the Niantic journey has been just how much pride Niantic Explorers take in showing off their community.  Whether at an Ingress Mission Day, a Pokémon GO Fest, or a Pikmin Bloom Community Day or any of the dozens of other events,  it is easy to feel the love local players have for their city.  

For the last 18 months, a small team at Niantic has been working on a new app that focuses purely on that joy of discovering the hidden gems of a city, and sharing it with friends. We call it Truffel.

Truffel has its roots in our original app Field Trip, and in the 100s of Niantic live events we have organized across the globe.  With Truffel, we hope to open up that joy of exploration to folks that might not be so focused on games.  

It’s got gaming elements for exploring and discovering for sure, but it’s more of a Shared Map of your favorite places, pinned together with your friends.  Our premise is that your local friends are often a better source of where to go and what to do than some well-trained algorithm.  One of our taglines is “your friends know where to go.”

We are just about ready to show you our work, starting with an Alpha test of Truffel in December in Austin, Texas. We are calling it an Alpha because we want to grow and develop it with our users, and many aspects of the app are still changing.  If all goes well, we’ll roll it out more broadly in 2023.

Want to check it out?  Sign up at www.truffel.com to be notified when we roll Truffel out, or to participate in the Austin Alpha test if you happen to be in or around Austin.