What city am I in?

The card above shows the city, town or village you are in right now, worked out from your device's position and printed with how accurate that position is.

How does it know which city I am in?

Your phone knows coordinates, not place names. We send your position to a mapping service built on OpenStreetMap, and it returns the city, town, village or municipality it has on record for that spot. That name is the answer above. This app does not look at your IP address, so the answer is about where your device is, not where your internet connection appears to come from.

Why does it sometimes show the wrong town?

Usually because you are near a boundary. Your position is a circle, not a point, and the accuracy figure on the card is its radius. If you are a few hundred metres from where one town ends and the next begins, and the circle is wider than that, the lookup can land on the neighbour. Step outside or near a window for a few seconds and the circle normally shrinks.

City limits are also rarely where people expect them. Plenty of places that feel like part of a city are, on the map, a separate municipality or a village with its own name, and the card prints what the map says.

Why is the answer blank?

Two things produce a blank. The lookup may not have come back, or there may be no town on record for that spot, which happens in open country and on water. We do not fill the gap with the county or the region. A page that asks what city you are in should not answer with a province.

If you want the full reasoning behind leaving things out rather than guessing, we wrote it down.