The official tourism guide app for the Almaty Region — built for the regional Tourism Department. A bilingual catalogue of attractions, national parks, sanatoria, hotels, food spots, sport, transport and events across one of the most beautiful regions of Kazakhstan. Native on both iOS and Android, with a Laravel admin used by the department to keep the catalogue alive.
The Almaty Region is one of the most travel-dense parts of Kazakhstan — Charyn Canyon, the Kolsai Lakes, Ile-Alatau National Park, Issyk Reserve-Museum, the Suyunbai Aronov Museum, dozens of sanatoria, hundreds of hotels and food stops. The regional Tourism Department needed a single, official mobile guide that a visitor could open before the trip and use during it. Not a marketing site. Not a third-party aggregator. Their guide.
We built it as a true native pair — Swift on iOS, Kotlin on Android — sharing a Laravel REST API and a single Laravel admin where the department's editors curate every entry. Native was the call because the app sits in the hand of someone walking through a canyon with patchy signal: tile caches, smooth photo browsing, sharp typography, and OS-native maps matter when you're the official guide and a traveller is leaning on you in a remote spot.
The catalogue is structured around eight headline verticals — Attractions, Sport, Resorts, Transport, Accommodation, Food, Health resorts, News — plus a small traveller toolkit (currency converter, phrase translator). Each entry carries photography, a description, a map pin with distance from the user, and the metadata the department cares about: category group, region rating, user rating, tariff range, and whether it's recommended or neutral. Everything is bilingual at the field level, so every place gets its Kazakh and Russian write-up side by side rather than living in two parallel CMS workflows.
Native UIKit/SwiftUI app shipped via the App Store. MapKit for map pins and routing, native image caching, haptics on key actions.
Native Android build with Material patterns, Google Maps SDK, and parity with the iOS feature set, shipped via Google Play.
Editorial workspace for the department: place entries, banners, news, notes for tourists, category groups, push notifications, ratings.
The Laravel admin is the department's daily workspace — administrators, editors, banners, news, notes for tourists, the category tree, push notifications, and the catalogue itself broken into objects: accommodation, food spots, sights, sanatoria. Each row carries a preview, a name field per language, a price band, region and user ratings, a status flag (recommended / neutral / on-banner), and a "show on home" toggle. New attractions go live without a deploy; banners and news roll out with a click.
