AutoPark Reminder
An iOS app that reminds you to start a parking session.
2026 · Design and development · In progress
The problem
Street parking in the Benelux is mostly paid, and mostly paid through an app. You park, you walk off, and the session you meant to start never happens. The fine costs many times what the parking would have. AutoPark Reminder does one narrow thing about that: it notices when you park and reminds you to start a session.
The approach
Everything runs on the phone. CoreLocation and CoreMotion feed an on-device detector that recognises when a drive starts and when it ends. When you start driving, the app sends a notification and starts a Live Activity for the trip. When you stop, it tells you it looks like you parked and asks you to confirm. One tap opens the parking app you chose, where you start the session yourself. AutoPark never starts or pays for parking, and because detection can never be guaranteed, it always asks instead of acting on its own.
There is no backend. There was nothing a server would add except risk.
Engineering notes
The hard part is being awake at the right moment without draining the battery. Detection runs in two phases. A watching phase arms only significant-location-change and visit monitoring, which cost almost nothing; iOS wakes the app when the phone moves a meaningful distance. That wake starts an active phase with precise GPS and CoreMotion automotive-activity classification to confirm a real drive. If driving is not confirmed, the app drops straight back to watching, and precise location updates are turned off the moment they are no longer needed.
The current trip lives on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island as a Live Activity, built with ActivityKit and a WidgetKit extension, with an App Intent so you can mark yourself parked in one tap.
Handing off to third-party parking apps needed care too. The chooser lists providers in randomised order, since I am not affiliated with any of them, and their icons are fetched at runtime from Apple's public App Store lookup API using only public app ids. If an app is not installed, the chooser falls back to its App Store page.
Privacy as architecture
The App Privacy label reads Data Not Collected, and it is literally true: no account, no analytics, no ads, and nothing leaves the device. Location and motion are used only to detect driving and parking. This was a design decision, not a marketing line, and it shaped the whole system. It also shaped App Review: the core flow needs a real car in motion, so the review notes spell out exactly what can be verified at a desk.
What shipped
Version 1 is an iPhone app for iOS 26 or later, free with no in-app purchases. It ships with onboarding, permission handling that keeps the app fully usable if location is denied, trip history, light and dark themes, and alternative app icons. The App Store listing is localised in English, Dutch, French, and German to cover the region, the app detects your region across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg automatically, and it is on its way to the App Store.