Roam: Travel Packing Lists

You can now set a time for when you leave, not just a date. It's optional. Leave it alone and everything works exactly as it did — the countdown runs to the start of your departure day, the way it always has. Set it, and the clock counts down to the hour you actually go, on your trip card and on the Home Screen. Also in this one, and it changes nothing you can see: purchases are now reported for advertising measurement from our billing provider's server rather than from your phone, so the same purchase stops being counted twice. The permission prompt, what it asks, and what declining does are all unchanged — declining still limits nothing.

Roam 1.10 is an interface pass. The four questions Roam asks when you make a trip now come in the order the list is actually built from, and each says what it buys you. Picking Family as the trip type fills in that you're travelling with kids, where you can see it and change it, instead of quietly meaning nothing. The checklist reads properly on paper, and the mark on an essential no longer looks like a warning. The paywall was the one screen still set in scaling type, and at larger text sizes it came apart — a hyphenated headline, a line cut mid-word, a card under the button. It is set the way every other screen is now, and it can go dark. Roam also tells you when there's a newer version on the App Store, once, with a Not now that it remembers. The permission prompt for advertising measurement now comes after you buy rather than the moment the paywall appears. It asks the same thing, and declining still changes nothing.

Roam 1.9 is about the weather being right. A traveller wrote in to say the list THE WEATHER FOR THE PLACE YOU ARE GOING TO Some destinations were taking their figures from a weather station in the wrong place. Tenerife's came from an observatory 2,371 metres up Mount Teide, so January read 8° for an island whose resorts sit at 21°. The Grand Canyon's came from the bottom of the canyon rather than the rim you stand on, and read twelve degrees too hot in July. Chamonix's came from an alpine pass above it, Sicily's from a hill town inland. Roam now picks a station by height as well as distance, and fifteen places whose map pin sat on a summit rather than a shoreline have been moved down to where you would actually stay. Thirty-one destinations changed station and twelve kept theirs on better terms; none ended up on a station further above or below the place than before. Checked against published normals, the figures are about four times closer than they were. Six more places have offline climate that had none: Cancún, Havana, Auckland, Ho Chi Minh City, Nouméa and Port Moresby — 360 in all. And where Roam still has no figures for somewhere, it says so and asks you rather than quietly building the list for mild weather. COLD MORNINGS UNDER WARM AFTERNOONS Cusco in June is 21° by day and 2° at night. Roam had always said "with cool evenings" on the trip screen and then packed nothing for them, because the rule that adds a layer only ran on trips inside forecast range. It now reads the nineteen degrees from the climate figures too, and puts the layer in. TWO THINGS THAT WERE WRONG Suggestions you accepted were being deleted the next time you changed anything about the trip — the dates, the bag, a stop — and never offered again, while a dialog promised Roam keeps what you have ticked off. It does now. "One per day, plus a spare" appeared under Underwear on every trip without laundry, including the three bag sizes where Roam had already packed fewer than that. The sentence now describes the arithmetic that actually ran.

Roam 1.8 is a finishing pass. Nothing here is new to learn — the controls you already use are better made, and three things that were quietly wrong are right. THE SWITCHERS AND THE SEARCH FIELDS ARE ONE THING NOW Every switcher in Roam — the passport's collections, the trips filter, Bag Fit, the checklist, and the three in your profile — is the same control, lit the same way. On iOS 26 the track is glass and only the chosen option is tinted. Below 26 it is a material that does the same job. Either way the row of options reads as one control with one choice in it, rather than as a row of badges. The two search fields had quietly disagreed about what focus looks like. The passport's rested on a hairline and brightened when you tapped it; the checklist's had no edge at all until touched, and then a fainter one. They are the same field now, and it is the better of the two. A MARK FOR EACH CONTINENT The passport's continent rows carried a disc with a two-letter code in it. Each now carries a small drawing of the continent itself, cut from the same atlas the globe is drawn from. Finishing a continent still earns its gold edge. THREE THINGS THAT WERE WRONG Filter your trips to Pinned with nothing pinned and Roam told you to press and hold a trip. Pressing and holding does nothing — pinning has always been in each trip's ··· menu. It now says so. Onboarding still described the world as fifty states and thirteen provinces. 1.7 opened six more countries, so it is eight countries and 208 states and provinces, and the picture it shows is the globe rather than the flat map it replaced. The step about planning your days had no picture at all and had been drawing a diagram in its place since it was written. It has the real thing now. ALSO Roam asks to be rated when you finish a packing list, rather than only after a trip has ended. Still once, ever.

Roam 1.7 turns your passport's world into a globe, and gives six more countries an inside. THE WORLD IS A GLOBE The flat map on your passport is a globe now. Drag to turn the earth, pinch to magnify, tap a country to mark it. It stays round however far you go in — the map used to square itself off and cut the world's corners away as you zoomed. RESET brings the whole world back. Zoom past the halfway mark and countries open into their states and provinces, which you can mark one at a time. Tap the line that counts your states in a country and the globe turns to it and settles at the right distance on its own. The world names itself as you go. Continents at rest, then countries as you pinch in — the largest first and more of them the closer you get, the way a map has always done it. A name is only printed where its own country has the room, measured along the line the word actually sits on, so nothing is ever written across a border and into somebody else. SIX MORE COUNTRIES HAVE INSIDES Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa join the United States and Canada. That takes Roam from 64 states and provinces it can draw and count to 208. Each one answers to whatever your phone calls it. Apple Maps writes "West Java" where the atlas writes "Jawa Barat", and both now land on the same place instead of counting as two. MARKING A PROVINCE MARKS THE COUNTRY You cannot have been to Eastern Cape and not South Africa. Marking a state or a province by hand left the country itself unvisited — grey on the map, and absent from your country count, your share of the world and your tier. Anything you marked before this is counted the next time you open Roam. PLANS FOLLOW WHAT YOU TELL US Say you are going to Illinois and Roam offers what it knows about Chicago, under Chicago's name, rather than nothing at all. The more precisely you name the place, the more precisely it answers. And when you name a city Roam has nothing for, it looks as far as 250 miles out and offers the nearest places it does know, with the distance to each written in your own units. A TRIP READS BETTER Weather is a titled card now rather than a strip between two rules, so a row of temperatures says what it is, and the day board is a card beside it. Both carry a lit edge that the rest of the page does not. DARK MODE WENT COOLER The near-black behind everything had a warm cast in it that stopped reading as paper at night and started reading as a smudge on the panel. It is a cooler, deeper charcoal now, and every piece of type standing on it gained contrast. The warmth moved into the ink, which is where it belongs. AN APP ICON FOR LIGHT MODE The icon follows your phone's appearance: the same luggage tag, on paper by day and charcoal by night. ALSO IN THIS RELEASE The passport you share says "% of 247" under its percentage, so a reader can tell what it was divided by. Searching for a destination no longer opens with a rule above the first result.