Trinkets is on the App Store. It passed Apple’s review first time, with no changes, and went live on 8 November 2026. Here’s why I made it, and how a designer got an app all the way from an idea to people’s phones.
It started with the little things
I work in travel, and one thing I hear again and again is that it’s the little moments that make a trip memorable. Not the view everyone photographs. The café you went back to every morning. The wrong turn that turned out to be the best afternoon.
But that’s not what we share. We post the perfect shots, and everything else gathers dust in the camera roll.
The used bus ticket. The hotel wristband. The coins you’ll never spend. Those are the things that make a trip yours, and most of us quietly keep them anyway. When I showed Trinkets to a friend, he put it better than I could: “Sometimes the stuff you would never post is the stuff you actually want to keep. In fact, we all keep them.”
What Trinkets does
You snap the little things you find along the way, and Trinkets cuts them out like stickers, right on your iPhone. Each trip becomes one collage you arrange yourself: pinch, drag and twist every trinket into place. If you want to, you can publish it to Discover and see what other travellers have collected.
There are no follower counts, no filters and no algorithm deciding what you see. It’s a slower kind of social, closer to a scrapbook than a feed.
How a designer built an app
I’m a product designer, not a developer. A few years ago, that would have been the end of the story: a nice set of screens in Figma and nowhere for them to go.
This time I built the whole thing myself, with AI as my engineering partner. I designed every screen, then worked through the build one piece at a time: the app itself, the on-device cut-outs, accounts and the Discover feed, automatic test builds that land on my phone every time something changes, the website, the privacy policy and the App Store listing.
It wasn’t a matter of typing one prompt and waiting. It was hundreds of small decisions: what should happen when you press and hold a trinket, how a collage should feel when you pick a piece up, what to leave out. The AI wrote the code. Deciding what was good enough to ship was still my job.
Taste is the new bottleneck
If there’s one thing I’ve taken from this, it’s that when anyone can build, what you build and how it feels matters more than ever. Art direction, branding and taste aren’t the finishing touches anymore. They’re the product.
So I spent as much time on the feel of Trinkets as on its features: the blurred, sun-soaked photography, the little hop the logo does, the click and buzz when a trinket lands, the copy that talks like a person. That’s the part no tool can do for you.
What’s next
You can already tap any traveller’s name to visit their profile. Coming next are gentle notifications, stationery stickers for your collages, and real-life trinkets: points you collect in the app and swap for a Trinkets keyring, pin, tin or beanie. You can follow along on our What’s new page.
We’re also giving back. For every new traveller who publishes their first collage, we’ll donate £1 to a UK Alzheimer’s charity, because some memories fade, and we’d like to help keep them. Read about our pledge.
Come and collect
Trinkets is free on iPhone. Take it on your next trip, collect the little things, and see what your trip looks like when it’s made of the moments you’d never post.
I’d love to see what you collect.
Tom Mason
Designer and maker of Trinkets
