Take a photo of a storefront sign, use the information on that sign, and find the business without typing a single word. It sounds almost too simple: “Take a photo → identify the business name → search.” I thought so too at first.
The problem is that storefront signs are almost a final boss for OCR. In daylight, sunlight reflects off them. At night, direct and indirect lighting can swallow letters. Shadows distort shapes, and years of wind and sun can fade paint or even leave whole letters missing. These are not rare edge cases; they are everyday conditions.
Then there are the signs designed to look like artwork. A business owner wants the name to look stylish, so the lettering becomes a logo, a drawing, or something halfway between the two. Sometimes even a person has to stare at it for a while. For AI, it can feel like someone saying, “Yes, this is text. Now guess what it says.” The AI may be swearing silently too. haha
GoPic was never meant for just one or two countries. From the beginning, the goal was a general-purpose app that could be used in more than 30 countries. But I have not personally walked every street in all 30-plus countries taking photos of signs. There are still environments, languages, and sign styles where I cannot yet know exactly what kind of errors will appear most often.
That made me ask whether it was really right to say, “Please introduce GoPic to your friends” or “Recommend it to someone you know.” After thinking about it for quite a while, I decided to temporarily take down the referral and sponsorship feature. Asking users to recommend something before I have verified enough of the unknowns felt a little too ambitious. I decided the product should get better first.
GoPic has now reached version 3.0.4, Build 132. Android shows Build 131, but functionally it is the same release. The design is much simpler than before. Anything that made me think, “Why is this even here?” or added friction without helping the core experience was removed wherever possible. These days I am learning that removing one unnecessary feature can be harder than adding another one.
I am absolutely not going to say that GoPic is “perfect” now. If I did, a bug would probably show up the very next morning just to prove me wrong. haha What I can say is that we have now carried out real-world photo tests in three countries, and the search results have been relatively stable across a range of conditions. That is a genuine relief.
The standard has been the same from the beginning: “Make something I will not be embarrassed to say I built.” Features have changed, structures have changed, and sometimes things I worked hard on were removed completely. But that standard is not going anywhere. More accurate. Simpler. And genuinely useful when someone is traveling. I will keep working toward that.
And now Chuseok is approaching. In East Asia there are harvest holidays such as Chuseok and the Mid-Autumn Festival, while in the West there is Thanksgiving. The dates and names are different, but the feeling of being grateful for the year’s harvest and spending good time with family seems much the same everywhere.
This has been another complicated and not-always-easy year. Still, I hope everyone can put their worries down for a little while, eat something good, and spend some peaceful time with people they care about. Wishing you a happy and abundant Chuseok. A respectful bow from me.
