Foursquare

About Foursquare

Foursquare's developer platform provides location and place-data APIs and SDKs for building geospatial and location-aware applications. The Places API offers search, discovery, geotagging and check-in, autocomplete, natural-language place recommendations (Ask API), and matching tools that map user-submitted data or merchant strings to standardized Foursquare Place IDs. The Movement SDK adds foreground and background location awareness for iOS and Android apps, while the Studio Data SDK and Map SDK provide web-based access to geospatial analytics, bulk data processing, and customizable map visualizations embeddable on web pages or in Jupyter notebooks.

The platform targets developers building retail rewards apps, travel tracking and recommendation apps, and ride-hailing apps, drawing on point-of-interest data aggregated from over 100,000 sources. Additional resources include a developer console, documentation, an API explorer with working code examples, a geospatial data catalog, and a Discord community.

Key features

• Places API for real-time venue search, discovery, and geotagging/check-in
• Movement SDK embeds foreground and background location awareness into iOS and Android apps
• Autocomplete API returns places, addresses, and geos matching partial keyword input
• Place Match and Transaction Match APIs match datasets or merchant strings to standardized Foursquare Place IDs
• Studio Map SDK and Data SDK for building and customizing geospatial web applications and pipelines
• Ask API returns recommended places from natural language queries

Frequently asked questions