Updates
Kava release notes.
Everything new in Kava, newest first.
- October 2026
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Sign-in stops waiting on a server that never answers
Signing in or making an account no longer spins forever when the connection is open but nothing comes back. After 30 seconds kava stops waiting and says it couldn't reach the server, so you can try again.
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A new city rides out a dropped connection
Adding a city, from the map or from Add a place, no longer fails because the connection dropped for a moment while it was being set up. kava waits and asks again, the way it already did while a city's cafés were loading. And if setting a city up did fail, the map no longer goes on saying its cafés didn't load once the city has arrived after all.
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Confirm your email from sign in
If you made an account and left before typing in the confirmation code, signing in later only told you to confirm first, with nowhere to put the code and no way to ask for a new one. Now sign in takes you straight to the code, for the address you typed, with "Send it again" underneath.
- September 2026
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Choosing a city, smarter
Near you now offers only the city your phone is actually in, never a guess from the other side of the world. Picking a very big area names it and suggests a neighbourhood inside it, instead of pointing everyone at Toronto and New York. And with lots of cities saved, Add a city stays in view under the list.
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Deleting and signing out, done properly
Delete my data now also erases the extra copies the photo picker kept of photos you attached, so nothing is left behind. And signing out without a connection signs you out, instead of saying "Couldn't sign out".
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Easier to read in light and dark
The "Back to my map" link after signing up was almost invisible in light mode, and red buttons like Delete my data were hard to read in dark mode. Both are clear now, and sign-in errors sit centred under the password.
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The first tap puts the keyboard away
With the search keyboard up, tapping elsewhere used to open whatever you tapped. Now the first tap just puts the keyboard away, on the Cafés tab, in city search and in the city list.
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Light, dark, or follow your phone
kava now follows your iPhone's appearance by default and switches when your phone does. Choose System, Light or Dark under Appearance on Profile, each on its own row that is easy to tap. If you had already picked light or dark, kava keeps your choice.
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More cities load, and load reliably
Sixteen big cities that could not load now do, among them Istanbul, Lagos, Cape Town, Dubai and Mumbai. kava also holds up when lots of people load a new city at once, a restored city with a name in another alphabet, like Kyoto, finishes setting up, and switching away from a city still loading no longer leaves your other city dimmed.
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kava+ is free with an account during the beta
While kava is in beta, every account gets kava+ for free: your cafés backed up, and big chains hidden from the map. Nothing to buy and nothing to cancel. Make a free account and it is on.
Using kava without an account still works exactly as before. When the beta ends we will say so ahead of time, and anyone who subscribes keeps kava+.
- September 2026
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Your name at the top of your profile
If you gave your name when you made your account, or Sign in with Apple shared it, your profile now greets you by it instead of just saying "Profile". Skipped the name? Nothing changes, and it works offline too.
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Tell us what you think, from anywhere
Tap Feedback at the top of the map, or Send feedback on Profile, to tell us what is broken or missing. When something goes wrong, the message now has a "Tell us" link that opens the form with the error already filled in. We are a small team and we read every note.
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Every tab opens at its top
Switching tabs used to bring you back to wherever you had scrolled. Each tab now opens at its top. A café page or the add sheet opening over a list still keeps your place in it.
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Welcome to the beta
A new page early in setup says what the beta means: every account gets kava+ free until the beta ends, with your cafés backed up and a map without the chains. Signed in, it is already on. Without an account, make one right there or tap Not now, and the kava+ screen shows the same offer instead of prices.
The map's header wears a small beta badge, and reads kava+ when you have it.
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A new app icon
kava's icon is now the mark on its own, without the name.
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A new welcome and sign in
The welcome map now fills all the room it has, and the setup steps have centred titles and tidier cards. Sign in and sign up read like the next page of the welcome: a clear heading, your details grouped in two cards, one main button, Forgot password under the password, and Continue with Apple below the form.
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Café pages, easier to use
A café's page now opens at its full height in one smooth motion, instead of jumping taller as its details arrive. Add to my map sits at the bottom of the page, where your thumb is.
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Your cafés come back to the map
On a new phone signed into an account with a backup, your cafés came back a second after kava opened, but the setup screens stayed in front and asked you to choose a city you already had, with "Your cafés are back" on top of them. Now kava goes straight to your map with your cities and cafés on it, and says so there.
The sign-in form also keeps below its close button when the keyboard scrolls it, instead of sliding underneath.
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Chains are counted in your city
A chain's café page used to say something like "Chain · 660 locations", a number that counted every city anyone had added to kava and kept growing. It now counts the chain in the café's own city, "Chain · 129 in Toronto", the same number kava uses when it asks whether you have been to the others.
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A little coffee cup for cafés without a logo
About half of cafés have no logo. They used to show an empty space on the café's page and a small letter in the list. Now they get a simple drawing of a coffee cup on its saucer, with steam rising, in both light and dark themes, and so does any café whose logo fails to load.
- September 2026
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Choose what your kava+ backup keeps
Sometimes the cafés on your phone and the cafés in your kava+ backup are different. Maybe you used kava for a while before signing in on a new phone. Now kava asks one plain question: what should your backup keep?
- **Every café from both** keeps them all. If the same café is in both, you keep the newer rating and note. - **Only this phone's cafés** deletes the cafés in your backup and saves this phone's instead. - **Only the backup's cafés** deletes the cafés on this phone and brings back the ones from your backup. - **Decide later** changes nothing, and kava asks again next time.
The two that delete cafés ask once more and tell you exactly what will go, so a stray tap can't lose anything.
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Location, when you ask for it
If you sign in, or add a city, without having answered the location question before, kava no longer asks the moment the city list appears. The list now offers "Use my location" at the top, and iOS asks only when you tap it. If you answered long ago, nothing changes: your city is still found and picked for you without a tap.
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Your city is found as soon as you allow location
When you allowed location during setup, the city step could still ask you to tap "Use my location" before it found your city. It now waits for your answer and shows the city near you straight away.
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A new city settles down
Picking a city nobody had mapped before could leave its map flickering once the city was ready, stuck on the placeholder shape with the loading pill blinking, and after a while the whole app could freeze until you reopened it. Now the map switches to the real city once, as soon as it is ready, and stays put.
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One letter is not a search
Typing a single letter into the city search said kava could not reach its server and asked you to check your connection, which had nothing wrong with it. The search now waits for a second letter, and the popular cities stay on screen until then.
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One sheet at a time
Opening a café from the Add a café sheet used to slide its page up on top of the sheet, which waited underneath and was already there when you closed the page. Now the sheet steps aside first, the café page has the screen to itself, and when you close it the Add a café sheet comes back on the search you left it on.
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One thing on screen at a time
A few places showed two things at once. They now take turns.
- Adding a café that belongs to a chain asks whether you have been to the others too. The café list used to slide back up underneath that question; now the question has the screen to itself, and the map follows. - On the first run, iOS asked for your location the moment "How it works" appeared, on top of the page you were there to read. It now asks when you tap Next, and the city list waits for your answer. Leaving the question up for a while no longer loses the city it finds for you. - On Profile, tapping Delete my data, Delete my account, Stop backing up or Sign out twice in a row could open the same question twice. It opens once, and the rows dim while the work is running.
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Plainer words
kava's questions and messages are easier to read. When you add a café from a chain, kava now says "Starbucks has 12 more cafés in this city" and asks if you've been to them, with a clear yes or no. Warnings about big cities, deleting your data and signing out use short, plain sentences too.
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Questions that fit the app
Questions like whether you have been to the rest of a chain, or whether to remove a café or a city, now appear in kava's own card, one at a time, instead of an iPhone pop-up landing on top of another sheet. Account and payment questions still use Apple's own alert.
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Search understands more Arabic and Hebrew
Searching an Arabic name now finds it with or without the hamza, and Hebrew names joined by a maqaf match the same words typed with a space.
- September 2026
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Signing in on a new phone
After you sign in for the first time, kava now shows "How it works" before you pick your city. Once you're signed in, going back no longer leads to the sign-in page.
If you delete kava and install it again, it now starts at the sign-in page instead of opening as your old account.
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Sign in with Apple
You can make a kava account, or sign back into one, with Apple: one tap, no password, and Hide My Email works if you would rather kava never sees your address. It is on the welcome screen and on the account screen.
The two buttons that used to sit there badged "Soon", Apple and Google, are gone. Apple is the real one now, and Google will come back when it works.
Deleting an account you made with Apple also tells Apple to end kava's access, so kava stops appearing under Sign in with Apple in your Apple ID settings.
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Suggested stays when location is on
Turning on location used to replace Suggested with Nearby on the Cafés tab. Now you get both: Nearby shows the cafés closest to you, and Suggested is still one tap away with a random handful from the city.
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Welcome back on a new phone
When you sign in on a new phone and your kava+ backup has cafés, kava asks right away if you want them back. Say yes and you land on your map, with your cafés on it. Say "Start fresh" and your backup is left alone until you decide what it should keep.
Questions after signing in now come before iPhone's "Save Password?" box, not on top of it.
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A city stays the city you picked
Every city on the service is filed under one short handle, and everyone who picks that city shares it. One badly formed request could file a different city's outline and cafes under that handle, and from then on everyone who picked the first city got the second, with the nightly refresh keeping it wrong.
The service now checks that a request describes the city it is filing under and refuses it otherwise, so the city you picked is the one you get.
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A city that cannot load says so at once
When the server had already tried to load a city and failed, the app kept showing "setting up" for three minutes before offering to retry, even though the server said what happened on the first ask.
The app now takes that answer straight away and offers the retry at once.
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A city with islands loads its mainland
Tokyo would not load. Its outline on the map was drawn around the islands far to the south, with the city itself outside it, so the map came up empty and then Tokyo was refused as being too big to be a city.
A city's outline is now the piece of it that its centre sits in, so Tokyo, and every other city with islands or detached districts, loads the city.
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A failed city search can try again
If the city search failed while you were choosing a city, there was nothing to tap: retyping was the only way to ask again. And after an earlier failed pick, the Try again under the search's error belonged to that pick, so one tap could begin mapping the city near you while you were looking for a different one.
A failed search now has its own Try again, which runs the search and nothing else. On first launch with no signal, the screen says that kava needs a connection to set up your first city, and it searches again by itself when you come back to the app.
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A failed erase keeps your photos
"Delete my data" removed the photos first and the cafés second. When the second step failed, and kava told you it could not erase this phone, every café was still there and every photo behind them was already gone.
The cafés go first now, and the photos only once they have. If the erase fails, nothing has left the phone.
- September 2026
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A failed unlock check hands Restore back
After paying, the paywall asks kava's server whether kava+ has unlocked yet and asks again every few seconds until it has. If one of those asks failed outright, on a bad connection or a database that would not open, the screen kept saying "Unlocking" with Restore purchases greyed out, and nothing on it worked again until the app was closed.
A failed ask now stops the loop and says so, and Restore purchases is back on to ask again.
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A region or a country is refused, not loaded
Asking for a city by a name that is really a province or a country, such as "Ontario" or "France", made the service try to load every café in it. That is far more than one machine holds at once, and the attempt could take the service down for everyone whose city was loading at the same time.
The service now checks that a name is a settlement before it looks for cafés, refuses an area larger than the biggest city it serves, and says which of the two it was so the app can tell you.
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A stuck request gives up so you can try again
If the connection to the café catalog stalled partway, the app waited on it forever: the list or map for that city never loaded, and tapping retry joined the same stuck wait until the app was closed.
Requests now give up after a short while and say so, and the next try starts fresh.
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A tidier look
kava opens straight into its own colours, with no white flash. Badges and chips have squarer corners that match the rest of the app, the map sits in the middle of its space, and Profile no longer scrolls up under the clock.
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A town with no cafés says so
Picking a small town that has no cafés in the map data showed "Cafés didn't load · Tap to retry" for good, and the retry never changed anything.
The map now says "No cafés in {town} yet", calmly, with nothing to retry.
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Making an account, smoother
The six-digit code now goes in on the screen that asks for it, and signing up with an address that already has an account says so instead of leaving you waiting for an email. On a weak connection kava no longer calls a right code wrong, and Create an account opens without the keyboard jumping up over the page.
Deleting your account now also reminds you that Apple keeps billing a kava+ subscription until you cancel it in your App Store settings.
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An offline search is not a typo
With no signal, typing a café name into the Cafés search answered "No cafés match. Check the spelling, or try a shorter word." under the red line saying the list could not load. The search had nothing to search, and the app was blaming your typing for it. The failed-load line now wins: it says kava couldn't load cafés for your city, and the retry beside it is the next move.
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Backed up an hour ago, not sixty minutes
The line under the backup switch on your profile counted the minutes and hours since the last backup, and it rounded them before deciding which word to use. So a backup from just under an hour ago read "60 minutes ago", and one from just under a day ago read "24 hours ago", each one tick short of the wording it was about to become. The count is now rounded down, so it never names a number that means the next unit up: 59 minutes, then 1 hour, then a date.
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Backups and restores you can trust
Changing a rating or a note, or removing a city, now reaches your kava+ backup straight away. A café you mark while your backup is coming back is kept, a café keeps its photo when you restore, and restored cafés open on a real map instead of a blank one.
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Big backups come back whole
A backup of more than a thousand cafés came back onto a new phone as the first thousand, with no word about the rest, and the next backup then dropped the rest from the server too. Marking every branch of a chain in a big city got there fast.
The restore now reads the backup in pages until it has all of it, and if what it fetched is short of what the server says it holds, it leaves the phone as it was and tries again the next time kava opens, rather than replace your cafés with part of them.
- September 2026
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The Cafés tab follows the city you switched to
Switching to a city that was still being set up left the Cafés tab showing the old city's cafés under the new city's name for up to half a minute, and a café marked in that window was filed under the wrong city.
The tab now empties the moment you switch and says which city it is setting up, so every mark lands in the city it belongs to.
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Cafés show their own logo, not Instagram's
Plenty of small cafés use an Instagram page, a Linktree or a Square storefront instead of a website of their own. The app read that address to find the café's logo, and got the platform's logo instead, so the café sat in the list wearing Facebook's f or Instagram's glyph. In Toronto alone that was 36 cafés, and Instagram was the sixth most common logo in the city.
Those cafés now show the same initial-letter tile as any café whose logo we do not have, and the ones already stored have been cleared.
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Coming back to kava tries again on its own
If a city's cafés failed to load while you had no signal, the map and the Cafés list kept saying so until you tapped retry, even after the signal was back, and even when one tab had already recovered and the other had not.
Now, whenever you come back to kava or back to a tab, a failed load tries again on its own.
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"Finding your city" finishes, even if you read ahead
On the first run, tapping Next while kava was still working out which city you were in could leave the "Finding your city" line spinning for good. And taking your time over the Allow dialog counted against that search, so a slow tap on Allow could lose your location for good.
Reading ahead no longer loses the answer, and the clock only starts once you have answered the dialog.
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New café logos arrive in one download, not dozens
For hours after a city was first added, opening it again downloaded the whole café list afresh almost every time. Café logos are looked up a few at a time in the background, and each one found counted as a change to the city, so a city you already had was never "unchanged" for long.
Logos now land all together once the lookup has finished with that city. One download brings them all, and every other open of a city you already have costs nothing.
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New cities load again
The map data kava draws its cafés from ships a new edition every month, and the latest edition moved the field that says whether a place is a cafe. Every city nobody had opened before failed to load against it, and the nightly refresh was set to fail the same way once it moved to that edition.
The service now reads the field the way both the current and the previous edition write it, so a new city loads and an existing one keeps refreshing.
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New cities always load the latest map
Adding a city nobody had opened before loaded it from one fixed edition of the map data, an edition that expires two months after it is published. From mid-October that would have meant no new city could load at all, and until then every new city arrived a month stale and was refreshed the same night.
The service now asks which edition is current before it loads a city, and the nightly refresh and new cities agree on the answer.
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Offline, you are still signed in
An hour into a flight, Profile could switch to "Create an account", the paywall could ask for an account you already had, and the first-run cover could come back, all because the phone could not reach the server to renew your session. Everything flipped back when the signal returned.
Those screens now read the account the phone already holds, so a bad signal never signs you out on screen.
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One dropped request no longer fails a city
Setting up a new city takes the server anywhere from ten seconds to a few minutes, and the app asks every few seconds whether it is done. On mobile data one of those asks easily goes astray, and a single lost one used to end the wait with "Couldn't set up this city · Tap to retry" while the server finished the job fine.
The app now shrugs off a dropped request or a busy server and keeps asking, with a short pause after each one. A city the server genuinely could not load still says so at once.
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Search finds the branch you mean
Searching "starbucks" in a city with a hundred of them gave thirty random branches, a different thirty each time, and "starbucks queen" found nothing, so the one you had actually visited usually could not be added.
Search now looks at the street as well as the name and puts the best match first: an exact name, then a name that starts that way, then a name with every word, then a match that needed the street. With location on, the nearest of a chain's branches come before the rest.
- September 2026
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Search folds ł, ø, ß and friends, and ignores vowel marks
Typing "lodz" did not find Łódź, "strassencafe" did not find Straßencafé, and an Arabic or Hebrew café name with vowel marks could not be found at all. The city picker also missed "saint jean" for Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and "st johns" for St. John's.
Café and city search now fold those letters, ignore Arabic and Hebrew vowel marks, and treat hyphens, dots and apostrophes the way a person typing does.
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Tap Search to look up a city nobody has added yet
Typing in the city picker now matches the cities kava already knows. To find one nobody has added yet, tap Search on the keyboard or the "Search everywhere" row under the list, or pick one of the cities offered under POPULAR. The list says so while you type, instead of telling you to check your spelling.
The lookup behind that comes from OpenStreetMap, whose terms do not allow it to be asked on every keystroke. Asking only when you say so keeps that lookup, and every new city kava sets up through it, working for everyone.
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Setting up a city, calmer
Tapping a popular city simply picks it, and the city you are in shows once, under Near you, instead of twice. The list no longer jumps when your location arrives. Start mapping says which city it is setting up, and switching city mid-load no longer leaves the new one stuck on "Setting up".
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Start mapping says what went wrong
Tapping "Start mapping" while kava's own service was having trouble ended in "Something went wrong setting up Toronto. Try again.", which named neither the cause nor what to do about it. It now says that kava ran into a problem with the city and asks you to try again in a moment, and the retry button stays. Offline, the message already told you to check your connection, and it still does; the two are kept apart so the advice fits the problem.
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The Cafés list holds still while you read it
With location on, the Cafés list could reorder itself a second or two after opening, when the phone finished working out where you were: the heading flipped to "Closest to you" and every row moved, sometimes right under the café you were about to tap.
The list is now ordered once, when you open the tab, from where the phone already knows you are. A fresh position waits for your next visit, and a few metres of GPS drift never count as a move.
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The map draws at once, signal or not
Signed in and opening kava after an hour or more away, on a plane or on the Underground, the map could sit on "Loading" for up to half a minute, and then show the big chains to someone who pays to hide them. Every café was already on the phone; the app was waiting to hear back from the sign-in server before it would draw.
It now reads who is signed in from the phone itself, so the map and the chains setting appear immediately, with or without a connection. What you pay for is still confirmed with the server the next time it can be reached.
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The map keeps its shape between opens
Cafés packed close together, in a food hall or around a station, could swap places on the map between the session a city was first loaded and the next open, because the two reads arrived in different orders.
They now arrive in one order, so a cell you saw yesterday is where it was.
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The progress bar and ring tell the truth at the edges
On the Profile screen, three cafés left in a city drew a full bar under a label reading "99%", and three cafés visited drew an empty bar under "<1%". On the map, the ring around the coverage number closed a few cafés early, because its rounded ends reached past the arc they were capping.
The bar now keeps a sliver of track while anything is left and a sliver of fill once you have started, and the ring keeps its gap open until the last café in the city. Empty and full mean exactly that, on both screens.
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A visit keeps the day you marked it
A café marked one morning in Tokyo could read as the evening before once you were home in Toronto: the app kept the moment and let the phone's current time zone name the day. A visit you mark from now on remembers the day you marked it, wherever you are when you look. Visits from before this update, and visits brought back from a backup, still take the day from the phone's current time zone.
Dates are also written the way your phone writes them: "Apr 12, 2026" on an American phone, "12 Apr 2026" on a British one.
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A bottom bar you can actually tap
The tab bar at the bottom was so thin it was hard to hit. It is now a comfortable height on every iPhone.
- September 2026
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Cafés near you, if you ask
A new Location switch on Profile, off until you turn it on. With it on, the Cafés tab puts the cafés closest to you first. kava never saves where you are.
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Every piece of the map is a café
In a small town the map drew far more pieces than it had cafés, so marking every café could leave most of it dark while it said 100%. Now every piece is one café, and together they cover the city.
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Bigger text fits
Changing the text size in iPhone Settings while kava was open cut labels short until you restarted it. kava now lays itself out again straight away, big numbers on Profile no longer run into each other, and at the largest sizes the figures stack.
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Find boroughs, and read city names in English
City search now reaches boroughs by their full names, like City of Westminster, and London means London. A city written in another alphabet shows its English name too, so Алматы reads Almaty and 京都市 reads Kyoto.
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Suggested changes every time you look
The Suggested list on the Cafés tab showed the same handful of cafés every time you came back. It now reshuffles on each visit, and holds still while you are reading it.
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Add a café, then watch it light up
When you add a café, kava asks its questions first, like whether you have been to the rest of a chain, then takes you to the map and rings the piece that just lit up. It works the same from the map or the Cafés tab, and the "added" pop-ups are gone: the café lighting up says it better.
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Cities open quicker, and say what is happening
The Cafés tab shows a city already on your phone straight away, and going back to a city you looked at recently no longer pauses to redraw it. While a new city loads, kava says it is setting up instead of flashing "0 cafés" or a made-up map. Search results name the country in full, and the city list in the map's header drops down from the top, the way its arrow points.
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More milestones, and they stay yours
Milestones used to stop at 50 cafés. Four named ones now wait above that.
A chain counts as one café, however many of its branches you mark. And a milestone you have reached stays reached, even if you remove a café later.
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kava+, monthly or yearly
kava+ is the paid side of kava, and it is two things: your cafés backed up and back on a new phone, and a map without the big chains.
Everything that is free today stays free. Your map, the cafés you mark, your notes, your ratings and your photos were never behind this and are not now. Photos still never leave the phone, paid or not.
It is $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year, with a free week to try it, and you can cancel any time in your Apple Account settings. Prices are shown in your own currency before you buy.
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The map covers your city cleanly
A café in a quiet part of town used to throw a long wedge across the map, and a few cafés at one address drew a fan of thin needles in the middle of downtown. Both are gone, and the map covers the city the way it should.
- September 2026
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A photo that stays the size you attached it
Attaching a photo to a review used to shrink it a little more with every line you typed, until a long note left a stamp where the picture had been.
The photo now keeps its size and the note scrolls, which is the way round it should always have been.
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Backing up is a switch, and coming back is not
Your cafés can now be backed up, and the switch that does it sits on your profile where you can see it. Nothing is copied until you turn it on, and turning it off stops it.
Getting them back needed no button at all. If this phone is missing cafés the backup has, kava brings them over when it opens, and if nothing is missing it does nothing. There was a "bring my cafés back" button here for a day; asking somebody to press a button to get their own data is a question they should never have to answer.
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Tapping outside puts the keyboard away, not your review
Writing a note and tapping the dimmed area to dismiss the keyboard used to close the whole review and lose what you had written.
The first tap now only puts the keyboard away. A second one closes the review, so leaving is still one gesture once you have finished typing.
While we were in there: an error under the sign-in fields used to sit there after you had fixed the thing it was complaining about. It clears as soon as you start typing.
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Every visit keeps its own date
kava used to keep a count of how many times you had been to a café. It now keeps the days themselves, so going back to the same place in March and again in June reads as two visits rather than the number two.
Cafés you marked before this keep everything they had. Where the old count was higher than the dates could account for, kava says so rather than inventing days you never went.
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The map front and centre
Opening kava now shows your map and how far you have got, and nothing else. Scroll and the map eases up out of the way to make room for the cafés you added most recently; scroll back and it settles into the middle again.
The map no longer pinches or pans. It opens large enough to take in the whole city at a glance, which is what the pinching was for.
- August 2026
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Adding a whole chain updates the map
Marking every branch of a chain visited added them to your list but left the map unchanged until you came back to it.
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Café logos show up sooner
A café's logo used to leave an empty square for about a second.
Its initial appears immediately now and the logo settles in over the top, so a row never looks half finished.
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Adding a café no longer makes the map blink
Part of your map could disappear for a second after adding a café before coming back.
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Reset your password with a code
Resetting a password and confirming a new account now use a six digit code instead of a link.
Read the email wherever you like, type the digits into kava on your phone, and carry on. Links could stop working before you ever tapped them; a code does not.
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Accounts
You can create a kava account with an email address, and delete it, and everything attached to it, from inside the app.
No email to us, no form to fill in.
- August 2026
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A crash is no longer the end
If something goes badly wrong, kava now shows a screen you can recover from instead of closing.
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Clearer empty screens
A few screens showed nothing at all when there was nothing to show.
They now say what is happening and what you can do about it.
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Small wording fixes
The home screen said "1 places". It says "1 place" now, along with a handful of similar slips in other corners of the app.
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kava stopped asking for your camera
The app asked permission to use the camera and then never opened one.
That request is gone. Adding a photo uses your photo library, and only when you choose to.
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Tapping twice adds one café
A quick double tap on the plus button used to record two visits.
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Your visits stay on your phone
On Android, the system was including kava's data in its automatic backups, which is not what the app told you.
It no longer does. Your cafés, notes and photos stay on your device.
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Better café listings, kept up to date
kava now keeps its own directory of cafés.
In practice: a café that is wrong is something we can fix, and every city is refreshed monthly, so places that close stop appearing and new ones turn up on their own.
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Toronto means Toronto
Searching Toronto used to return the whole amalgamated region, which is a very large area with a lot of cafés in it that nobody thinks of as Toronto.
It now means the city people mean.
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Somewhere to start
The add screen suggests cafés from your city rather than showing you an empty box and a cursor.
They change each time, so it is worth a look even in a city you know well.
- July 2026
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Watch your city arrive
Setting up a new city used to cover the screen while it worked.
Now the map stays where it is, dims slightly, and finishes with a ripple across the city when it is ready.
- July 2026
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Only actual cafés in the list
The café list used to include places that were not really cafés.
It sticks to coffee shops now.
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Hide the big chains
A switch in your profile takes large chains off your map and out of suggestions.
Some people are collecting independent coffee shops; some want everywhere they have been. It is a preference now instead of a decision made for you.
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Long lists of cafés scroll smoothly
If you had added a lot of places, your list of cafés used to stutter as you scrolled it.
It does not any more, however many you have.
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Your figures appear straight away
The counts on your profile used to arrive a moment after the screen did.
They are there when you open it now, and they update the instant you add a café rather than the next time you look.
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Moving between tabs is instant
Switching to your profile and back used to rebuild the whole map on the way.
It does not any more.
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A café lights up the moment you add it
The map used to fill in its new piece a beat after the sheet closed, which made adding a café feel like it had not quite worked.
It happens immediately now.
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Cities keep their own cafés
A café you add in one city no longer turns up on another city's map.
If you travel, each place you have lived in or visited keeps its own record.
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Every city in the world
The city list used to be short. Now you can start typing and find essentially any city on earth.
Keep as many as you like. Each one holds its own cafés and its own map.
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Adding a café takes one tap
Find a café in the list and tap the plus. That is the whole thing.
If you tap it again later, kava records that you went back rather than adding it twice.
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Delete everything, whenever you like
Your profile has a way to erase every café, note and photo kava holds.
It asks once, and then it is gone.
- July 2026
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Been to every branch? Add them together
If you add a café that has other branches in your city, kava asks whether you have been to those as well.
One tap instead of five for the chain you actually go to.
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Pinch to reach the small pieces
Dense parts of a city end up with very small pieces on the map, which were awkward to tap.
The map now zooms, so you can get to any of them.
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Say something about a café while it is fresh
After you add a café, kava offers you a moment to rate it and write a line about it.
You can add a photo too. Both are optional and both show up on that café's page afterwards.
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Remove a café you added by mistake
Swipe a café in your list to take it off your map.
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Your city, and the cafés in it
Pick your city and it appears as a map broken into small pieces. Every café you add lights one up.
The more places you have been, the more of your city is filled in.
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kava begins
Work started on kava: a way to keep track of the cafés you have actually been to, and to watch your city fill in as you go.
Nothing under this filter yet.
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