Plane and Simple vs HauntsIO
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Plane and Simple
This app uses augmented reality to identify aircraft in real-time. Point your device at a plane to see its flight number, origin, altitude, speed, and distance overlaid on your camera view.
- Augmented reality flight tracking
- Real-time aircraft information
- Display flight numbers
- Show altitude and speed
- Identify country of origin
- Measure distance to aircraft
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Ever wonder about that plane overhead? Just point your iPhone or iPad at the sky. Plane and Simple uses augmented reality to pin live flight data directly onto aircraft in your camera view. No searching, no map scrolling. Just look up. WHAT YOU'LL SEE FOR EVERY FLIGHT - Airline, flight number, and callsign - Aircraft make, model, and registration - Altitude, speed, heading, and climb/descent rate - Distance from you in real time - Origin and destination cities with route info TAP ANY PLANE TO GO DEEPER - Real aircraft photos courtesy of Planespotters.net - Great-circle route map from origin to destination - Satellite views of departure and arrival cities - Compass bearing visualisation AND THEN IT REMEMBERS Every aircraft you tap is kept permanently. Come back a month later and you have a collection: the airlines you've caught, the aircraft types you've seen, the countries their tails are registered in. Your logbook syncs through your own iCloud, so a new phone never costs you the collection. HOW RARE WAS THAT? Every aircraft type is weighed against a database of more than 91,000 airframes. When the app calls a catch uncommon, it's telling you how many of that aircraft are left in the world: 270 A380s, 809 747s. Not a guess. NINETEEN ACHIEVEMENTS From your first aircraft to catching an airline's flight number one. Two are secret, and the best of them are the ones you can't go looking for: the same aircraft twice on different days, or the same route flown in both directions. WORTH SHOWING SOMEONE Turn any sighting into a card made from your own photo of the sky, with the aircraft marked where it actually was and its contrail running the way it was actually flying. Plane and Simple tracks live aircraft using the OpenSky Network and knows 619,000 routes, 1,000 airlines and 3,700 airports by name. It uses your device settings for metric or imperial units, and is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Simplified Chinese. No account required. No ads. Your logbook stays on your device and in your iCloud, never ours. Just point, and see what's flying.
HauntsIO
Record your visits to places with photos and notes to build a visual history of your life. Automatically detect flights and group visits into trips. Share your experiences with friends or keep them private.
- Log check-ins with photos and notes
- Automatic flight detection
- Organize visits into trips and lists
- Friend sharing and privacy controls
- Year in Review narrative
- Apple Watch companion app
- Home screen widgets
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Check-ins are the breadcrumbs that become stories on Haunts.IO Haunts is a check-in app for the places that matter to you. Open it when you arrive somewhere, tap the venue you're standing in, drop a photo and a quick note, and you've added a row to a map of your real life that grows quietly in the background. Every check-in is a breadcrumb. The pins cluster as you zoom out, and over time a year of weekends becomes a route you can scroll through. Pull up any venue and see when you were last there, who you tagged, what photo you took, and the nearby places you might want to revisit. The Stats tab shows the same data the other way around: top venues, busiest months, countries crossed, and a heatmap of where your life happens. Year in Review reads the trail and writes a short narrative of your year from the venue names, photos, and trips you logged. Trips and lists are where the breadcrumbs turn into stories. A trip groups every venue you visited on one weekend or one country crossing, and trips nest, so a multi-week Europe sweep can hold the smaller Paris and Rome legs inside it. Lists are reusable: a Saturday brunch list, a downtown best-of, a wineries-near-home list you build over months. Bucket list venues are the inverse, places you haven't been yet but plan to, surfaced on the map and in nearby search whenever you're close enough to stop in. Flights are detected automatically. Two airport check-ins within sixteen hours pair into a flight with a great-circle arc on the map and on the full-screen 3D Globe, and the AI suggests airline and route if you don't remember. Logging just the airport you started from is enough, and Haunts asks about the destination later. Friends run through all of it. Public profiles let anyone with your handle browse the venues you've made public. Friend requests, mutual following, and contacts match (emails and phone numbers hashed on your device before they leave it) make it easy to find the people you share visits with. Tag friends on a check-in and the visit shows up on their feed too. Every check-in has three visibility states, public, friends, or private, so the weekend bar crawl stays out of your work network. Stickers and achievements add a light game layer for the people who like that, and stay invisible if you don't. A monthly leaderboard tracks XP from check-ins, photos, and streaks, and once-a-year visits like a hometown anniversary or a recurring conference count toward it too. The Apple Watch companion checks you in from your wrist, with the same nearby venue coverage as the phone. Home screen widgets jump straight to the Nearby list, so checking in takes about three seconds when you're walking through a door. Search covers your full history and forgives how memory works: possessive names like Lowe's, or remembering "winery" when the venue is a "vineyard." A discovery tier on top pulls in venues you haven't been to yet, biased to where you're standing. Free to use, no ads, no selling your data. Sign in with Google or Apple.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: HauntsIO at none against Plane and Simple's 4. HauntsIO also leads on device support (4 vs 2) and iOS requirement (15.1 vs 18.5). On price, rating, review sentiment and ratings volume there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Plane and Simple sells 4 one-off in-app purchases. HauntsIO asks for nothing beyond the download.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Plane and Simple against 5.0 for HauntsIO. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 2 and 4 respectively. Written reviews split almost evenly too, at 100% and 100% positive.
Both ship on a similar rhythm, roughly weekly. Both last shipped on October 3, 2026.
| Parameter | Plane and Simple | HauntsIO |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (2 ratings) | 5.0 (4 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 2 | 4 — better |
| Update frequency | Weekly | Weekly |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple Watch — better |
| Requires iOS | 18.5 | 15.1 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 19 MB | 127 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Merano Studio Limited | MDPSync, LLC |
Customer experience
Plane and Simple
HauntsIO
In-app purchases
Plane and Simple
- Espresso$0.99
- Leave us a tip$0.99
- Latte$1.99
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- Whole bag of beans$3.99
HauntsIO
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Plane and Simple free?
Is HauntsIO free?
Which has better reviews, Plane and Simple or HauntsIO?
Do Plane and Simple or HauntsIO have ads?
Which is updated more often, Plane and Simple or HauntsIO?
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