Stop typing 'Riverside Park' for the fiftieth time — place suggestions in FamilyBoard

There's a kind of friction in a family calendar nobody talks about — the kind that builds up because you type the same thing over and over again. "Mia's soccer field, Solna." "Dr. Lundqvist's office, 142 Sveavägen." "Riverside Park." The fiftieth time you fill in the same location, it isn't annoying anymore — it's a quiet, monumental waste of time.

Today we're rolling out place suggestions in FamilyBoard. When you start typing the location for a new event, the app automatically suggests places from your family's last 200 events. Type "Rive" and "Riverside Park" is the first match. A small thing — but it removes one of the quietest time-sinks in calendar work.

What it is

Nothing magical, no AI, no cloud service. Just: when you create an event, the app looks at the locations your family has used in the last 200 events, dedupes them, sorts them alphabetically — and shows them as suggestions while you type.

So you don't get a list of Stockholm's most-visited locations. You get a list of your family's most-visited locations. That's the difference between generic autocomplete and one that actually knows how you live.

How it feels

On web it's a plain <datalist> — the native dropdown that the browser renders itself. You start typing, a small list appears, you pick or finish typing. No modal, no overlay, no mode change.

On iOS it's chips. You see three or four chips above the keyboard with your most-used places, and you can tap directly — or type and get filtered results. Native iOS feel, no JavaScript weight.

Both surfaces work the same offline as online. The list comes from your own local data, not from Google Maps or any other service.

Why we built it this way

It's tempting to wire up Google Places and get suggestions for "all locations in your city". But for a family calendar, that's the wrong thing — you don't want all places, you want your places. Riverside Park is probably not the most-searched location in town, but it's probably one of your family's most-used.

This approach also lets us avoid:

• An external API bill that grows with our user base
• A third-party dependency that could profile the family
• A GDPR question about where the addresses are sent
• Latency on a small interaction that should feel instant

It all happens locally. All places come from your own calendar. That's why it's also fast — no round trips to a server, no loading states.

Technical — for the curious

On web we fetch the list with a simple query: select location from events where family_id = X order by created_at desc limit 200. The result is deduped, sorted alphabetically, and rendered as <option> elements inside a <datalist>. The browser handles the rest — autocomplete, focus, keyboard navigation, all for free.

On iOS it's a PlaceAutocompleteField component that takes the same data and lays out chips above the keyboard. Tap a chip, the location fills in. Type yourself, the chips filter down. That's it.

Both surfaces are tiny in code. This wasn't a feature that took months to build — it just took us noticing it.

The quietest UX win

Most family apps compete on bigger features: AI assistants, smart import, automated reminders. But the quietest wins are often the ones that remove three seconds of friction from an action you do 200 times a year.

Three seconds times 200 is ten minutes — per year, from a single tweak. Multiply by two parents and you're at fifteen. It isn't glamorous, but it's real.

Try it

Place suggestions are in the latest iOS app and on familyboard.io. Create an event, start typing in the location field — that's all there is to it.

We ship this kind of improvement every week. Big releases like Bonus Family get the headlines, but it's the small ones that keep an app being used six months in. You don't have time to learn a new app every week. We have time to make it a little better every week.