Real hand-drawn maps
You play on scans of hand-traced district maps — the same maps the villages were recorded on. No satellite tiles, no modern political borders.
موطني
Mawtini · Palestine
A daily journey through the villages of historic Palestine.
You are given a name. You find where it belongs on a hand-drawn map of its district — and then you learn its story. Every place you locate lights up your Memory Map.
1,025villages & towns
16districts
33hand-drawn maps
0data collected
The idea
The game is the hook. Remembrance is the point.
Mawtini asks you to place a village on the map of the district it belonged to. It is a game, and it is meant to be enjoyed — but a village is never a score. When a place was destroyed, the app says so plainly and quietly, and nothing celebrates over it.
A story, not a scoreboard
Locate a place and its history opens: what it was, how large, what happened to it, and where the account came from — in both English and Arabic.
Works with no signal at all
Every map, name and history ships inside the app. On a plane, in a tunnel, with the phone in airplane mode — it plays exactly the same.
Inside the app
Six screens, one purpose
Scroll sideways to see all six. English shown; the app is fully Arabic too.
Every day
Today's village
One village a day, the same one for everybody, chosen by the date. Play it in a minute, keep your streak, and put it on your Home Screen as a widget so the day starts with a name.
Miss a day and the streak resets — but nothing is lost. Every village stays in the atlas, and you can return to any region whenever you like.
Bilingual by design
English and العربية — not a translation layer
Village names, district names and histories are stored in both languages and written by people, not machine-translated on the fly. Switch iOS to Arabic and the whole app turns over: right-to-left layout, Arabic type, and — if you want it — Eastern Arabic numerals.
Names follow the spellings used by PalestineRemembered.com, with alternates kept so search finds a village however you spell it.
Privacy
Nothing about you leaves your phone
- No account. No sign-up. No email required to play.
- No analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no third-party SDKs.
- Your progress lives on your device, and syncs across your own devices through your private iCloud — which only you can read.
- Gameplay makes no network requests at all. The one exception is the “More apps” screen in Settings, which asks Apple for app icons and sends nothing about you.
- Apple's privacy label for the app is Data Not Collected.
Where the content comes from
Sourced, and credited
Village names, district groupings and the traced maps come from PalestineRemembered.com. Histories, populations and dates are drawn from Wikipedia and Wikidata — Wikipedia text under CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikidata under CC0. Every village page links back to its source.
Where a source could not be confirmed, the app shows no history rather than a guess. Around 600 of the villages currently carry a written history; the rest carry their names, their district, and their place on the map.
The anthem is Mawtini — words by Ibrahim Tuqan, music by Mohammed Flayfel. Type is Reem Kufi and Changa, under the SIL Open Font License.
موطني — my homeland
Free. Offline. Bilingual. No ads, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions.
iPhone and iPad, iOS 18.6 or later.