August 23, 2026
What's new in Seated v1.2
What's new in Seated
A rebuilt map, wait-time forecasts, alerts for your favorite spots — and no more sign-up screen.
Seated has had a big update. Here's everything that changed, and why.
No account. At all.
This is the biggest one.
Seated used to ask you to make an account before you could report a wait or save a favorite. That's gone. Open the app and you can do everything immediately — no email, no password, no verification step, nothing standing between you and the map.
The reason is simple. Seated only works if people report their waits, and every screen between "I just sat down" and "reported" is a screen where people give up. A sign-up form is the biggest one of those. So we removed it.
Your reports, points, and favorites all still stay yours. The app just doesn't need to know your name to keep track of them.
If you want an account, you can still add an email — it means your history survives losing your phone, and you can use Seated on more than one device. That's the only reason to.
The map tells you more at a glance
Every restaurant is a pin, and every pin is now filled with the color of its current wait. Green means walk right in. Yellow's a short one. Orange, get a drink first. Red, go somewhere else.
You don't have to tap anything or read anything. Look at the map, pick a green one, go eat.
The map itself is faster too, with 3D buildings and a proper 2D/3D toggle if you'd rather see it flat.
Wait time forecasts
Not every restaurant has someone reporting from inside it at all times. So when there's no fresh report, Seated now looks at what a place is usually like at this hour on this day and shows you a forecast.
Forecasts are always clearly marked as predictions — you'll see a sparkle icon and the word "Forecasted," and the pin looks different from a live-reported one. We'd rather tell you we're guessing than let you think a guess is a fact.
This only kicks in once a restaurant has enough history to say something meaningful. Most places aren't there yet. They will be, as people report.
Alerts when your favorites clear up
Save the places you actually care about, and Seated will tell you the moment one of them drops to no wait.
There are guardrails on this, deliberately. You won't get pinged more than a few times a day, never about the same restaurant twice in a short window, never when a place is closed, and never in the middle of the night. Notifications you turn off are worse than notifications you never sent.
You can switch this off entirely in Profile.
Visit detection, if you want it
This is the one we thought hardest about.
Seated can notice when you've spent real time at a restaurant and ask, right as you're leaving, how long you waited. It's the difference between remembering to report and just answering a question at the moment you obviously know the answer.
How it works matters:
- It's off by default. You turn it on, or it never runs.
- It runs entirely on your phone. The part that figures out you visited somewhere happens on your device, not on a server.
- Your location history never leaves your phone. We don't collect it, store it, or upload it. Not a trail, not a visit log, not dwell times.
The only thing that ever reaches us is a report you actively choose to send — and that tells us a restaurant and a wait time, not where you've been.
You can turn it off any time in Profile, or revoke location entirely in iOS Settings. The app works fine without it.
Explore and Activity
Explore lists everything near you, sorted by distance, shortest wait, or wherever people are reporting most right now. Search by name or by cuisine.
Activity shows recent reports around you — either within 25km or everywhere. Reports show up without anyone's name attached; you see the restaurant, the wait, and when.
What we're still working on
Seated is early and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
The map gets more useful the more people report, and right now there are plenty of restaurants with no data at all. That's not a bug — it's just what a community app looks like before the community shows up.
There's more coming: better forecasts as history builds, restaurant owners being able to claim their listing, and eventually a real picture of when a town is actually busy.
The ask hasn't changed
Every wait time you see came from someone who took three seconds on their way to the table. That's the entire mechanism. There's no company calling restaurants, no sensor in the ceiling — just people telling each other where the wait is.
So if Seated saves you a guess tonight, pay it back on your way in. Tap the restaurant, tap how long you waited, put your phone away.
Know the wait before you go.
Seated is free on the App Store. Made by Mooney Co in Plymouth, Michigan. Questions or bugs: support@seated.site