Know your ground.

Sweden has 2.1 million foreign-born residents — about 21% of the population. Its public alert infrastructure is authoritative, well-maintained, and almost entirely in Swedish. For the roughly 1.2 million English-comfortable residents who live here without fluent Swedish, that’s not a gap. It’s a wall.

Skouta is a civic access tool that removes that wall. A real-time mobile application — live on iOS, with Android to follow — that aggregates official Swedish government alerts and delivers them in English, accurately, with full source attribution, and without editorializing.

The tagline says it directly: Know your ground. Not a feature description. A feeling of presence, belonging, and awareness in the place you chose to live.

"Not being dependent on others to translate your own life."

"Trust is not a feature of Skouta. It is the product."

Public safety information is only useful if you can understand it. An expat receiving a police alert on their street in Swedish faces a binary choice: spend time trying to translate it, or ignore it. Neither is acceptable for information that can directly affect your safety or daily routine.

The problem wasn’t the data. Sweden’s official sources — Swedish Police, SMHI, Trafikverket, SL, Krisinformation (MSB), Västtrafik, and regional transport operators — are freely available via public APIs, well-structured, and reliably updated. The problem was access.

No English-language layer existed. We built one.

Fika Design Co. conceived, designed, and launched Skouta as a founder-led product. There was no client brief. Every decision — from product strategy and information architecture to push notification design, translation quality control, and the free/paid feature split — was made by us, with full accountability for the outcome.

A three-tab mobile application aggregating real-time alerts from eight official Swedish government data sources, translated into English and delivered with full source attribution. Built iOS-first and now live on the App Store, with Android to follow. The product includes:

• AA three-tab application — Home (location-centric status), Alerts (live feed in map or list view), and Profile — covering nine alert categories: police, weather, transport, fire, ferry, accident, roadworks, animals, and general.
• BA geographic map view with category-coded alert pins across Sweden, powered by Mapbox.
• CA push notification system with category-level opt-in controls. Critical alerts push to everyone; Important alerts respect opt-in; lower priority lives in the digest.
• DPlain-English source attribution and translation disclaimer on every single alert — a brand feature, not a legal footnote.
• EA free/paid structure built around 14 days of Skouta Premium for every new user, with personalization gated behind the paid tier and core safety value permanently free.
• FThe Daily Digest — Pip’s morning report — designed as the primary long-term retention hook on the paid tier.

Brand character

Pip — the small one who always knows first.

Pip is the bird inside the Skouta mark. Gender-neutral, quietly observant, wry and warm. Pip owns the Daily Digest and shows up across empty states, onboarding, and social. Etymology: “pip” is the first crack in an eggshell when a bird hatches — the first signal. Skouta is the radar; Pip is the signal that comes back.