More than 800 towers from Chicago to Shenzhen, on a map and in your pocket. Stamp the ones you've actually visited — and watch them rise again as a 3D city built entirely from your own travels.
Browse the whole world for free. The parts marked Pro are the ones I built from scratch — the 3D work and the travel book.
Across more than 130 cities in 50 countries, from the Empire State Building to Jeddah Tower. Heights, floors, years and architects are bundled into the app, so the atlas itself works offline.
The 250 tallest on one Apple Maps view, so it stays fluid. Filter to your visited, favorites or wishlist and every one of those gets a marker, however short.
By name, city or country. Sort by height, name or completion date, and narrow by continent or whether a tower is finished, rising or still on paper.
One building picked every morning, the same for everyone, with its photo and story. A small reason to open the app on a Tuesday.
Stamp a tower once you've stood beneath it. The book counts your countries, cities and total metres climbed, and keeps the date of every visit.
Follow a name — Adrian Smith, SOM, Gensler — through every tower they put on the list. Or work through a whole continent.
Every building as an interactive model you can orbit, tilt and zoom — generated from its real height and silhouette, with lit windows after dark.
Your visited towers assembled into one imaginary skyline you can walk around. Streets, traffic, aviation beacons, and a day-night switch.
A line drawn across the map through your visits in the order you made them — your own route through the world's tall buildings.
The facts, photos and descriptions come from Wikipedia and Wikidata, so reading them stays free — charging for other people's donated work would be wrong. Pro unlocks the parts I made.
Enough to feel the whole thing before you decide.
Buy it once, on any of your devices, and it stays yours. Restore is a single tap.
Skyline Explorer has no server of mine behind it. Your visits, favorites and wishlist never leave your phone, and I have no way of seeing them.
Last updated: August 2026
Nothing. The app has no account system, no analytics, no advertising SDKs and no third-party tracking libraries. I never see which buildings you look at or which ones you mark as visited.
This is stored with Apple's SwiftData and UserDefaults, in the app's own container; your own photos are saved as ordinary files alongside it. All of it is included in your normal iPhone backup and is deleted when you delete the app. Choosing a photo uses Apple's system picker, which hands the app that one image and gives it no access to the rest of your photo library.
The building facts — heights, floors, years, coordinates — ship inside the app, so browsing and the map work with no connection at all. Photos and the descriptive texts are fetched from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons when you open a building's card, which means Wikimedia's servers see the request the way they would if you opened the article in Safari. No identifier of you or your device is attached, and the results are cached so the same building isn't fetched twice.
The map is Apple's MapKit. Map data is requested from Apple as you pan and zoom, under Apple's privacy policy. The app does not request your location and cannot see where you are.
Skyline Pro is a one-time in-app purchase handled entirely by Apple. Payment details go to Apple, never to me, and I receive no personal data from the transaction — only the anonymous, aggregated sales figures every developer sees.
Skyline Explorer collects no data from any user, including children under 13.
If this changes in a future update, the new version will be posted here with a new date.
Questions? support@engelheartware.de
Happy to help with any questions or feedback — I aim to reply within a few days.
Tell me what happened, what you expected, and your iOS version — it helps a lot. Send report →
Or a detail is wrong. Send me the name and city and I'll get it into the next update. Suggest a tower →
No. Every building, the map, search and the Skyscraper of the Day are free, along with your first 10 visit stamps. Pro adds the 3D city and unlimited stamps.
No. Skyline Pro is a single €4.99 purchase. There is no subscription in this app and there isn't going to be one.
The buildings, the list, the search and your Travel Book do. Photos and descriptions need a connection the first time you open a building — after that they're cached.
Facts from Wikidata, descriptions from Wikipedia, photos from Wikimedia Commons — each credited in the app with its author and licence. See the credits below.
No — more than 120 of the towers are still planned or under construction, and you can browse them, but the stamp only unlocks once a building actually exists.
iOS 18 or later, on iPhone and iPad.
Credits. Building data from Wikidata (CC0). Descriptions from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 and shown unmodified with a link to the source article. Photographs from Wikimedia Commons under their individual licences — every photo in the app carries its photographer and licence, linking to the file page. Maps by Apple. The 3D models are original procedural geometry generated in the app, not third-party assets.