About

Mark the countries you’ve been to and they’ll appear as patches on your bag. Use the map to add them.

Your collection is stored on your device, so it works without a signal. You don’t need an account unless you want one.

What counts as visited

That’s up to you.

Airport transit, a border crossing, an afternoon off a cruise ship. If you think you’ve been there, mark it. There’s no minimum stay and no set of rules about what does or doesn’t count. It’s your map.

The list

The country list is based on ISO 3166-1, with UN membership used for the headline count.

There are 193 UN member states and 256 countries and territories in the full list, or 260 if you count the United Kingdom as its four nations rather than as one country. You’ll see both the UN figure and the full one wherever totals are shown. Places you add yourself are counted separately and never change the 193.

Borders and sovereignty can get complicated. Inclusion here reflects the data standards the app uses, not a judgement on whether a territory should or shouldn’t be a country. Where a status is disputed, the app says so rather than pretending there’s a simple answer.

What’s left out, and why

Kashmir

Kashmir is administered in separate areas by India, Pakistan and China. The app records the country whose administered territory you visited rather than treating Kashmir as a separate destination. If that doesn’t fit how you see it, you can add Kashmir yourself.

Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson

These are internationally recognised parts of Ukraine that are wholly or partly under Russian occupation during an active war. They aren’t included as separate collectible destinations.

Antarctic territorial claims

There are seven territorial claims in Antarctica, some of which overlap. For the purposes of the app, Antarctica is one place rather than seven.

Palestine

Palestine is already included as a UN observer state, reflecting its current UN status. It isn’t duplicated as a disputed entry.

Flags

Most places have an obvious flag. A handful don’t.

The list has six places with no single agreed flag, and two others with more than one reasonable choice. Where there isn’t a clear answer, the app doesn’t quietly make one for you. You’ll either see a plain patch or be able to choose the flag you want to use.

Northern Ireland is the clearest example. It hasn’t had an official flag since 1973, so simply using whichever flag happened to come with a flag library would mean taking a position by accident.

The colour used for each country on the map is a national colour, mostly taken from sports team kits or part of a flag.

Where the data comes from

Country outlines come from Natural Earth, which is public domain. Flag artwork comes from flag-icons, which is MIT licensed. City locations come from GeoNames, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. None of them is responsible for, or endorses, the decisions Flags on Bags makes about disputed borders and territories.

Natural Earth generally draws borders according to who controls the territory on the ground. That would, for example, show Crimea as Russian-controlled. Flags on Bags instead uses Natural Earth’s Ukrainian point-of-view boundaries for Ukraine and Russia, so Crimea appears as part of Ukraine. Kosovo is shown with its own outline rather than as part of Serbia.

Your data

Your collection lives on your device. You can use the app without signing in, and it doesn’t need an internet connection to keep track of where you’ve been.

Signing in is optional and is there if you want to move or sync your collection between devices.

The app doesn’t track your location and doesn’t contain analytics.

You can save your entire collection as a file whenever you like. If you have an account, you can also delete it, and everything stored with it, from inside the app.