Wow, I'm almost annoyed on the authors behalf of how much hoops there are to jump through.
>To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago. Not approximately five years, not that week—that exact day when you press "submit" on the form minus five years. Miss it by 24 hours and your application is reject after months of waiting, and you have to pay a hefty fee to re-apply.
That's a hilarious requirement. I wonder how that ended up in there.
Additionally, I did a request for my information from the home office prior to filling in my form. After all, you have the right to request the information they have on you that will be used to verify your form. Kafka would be proud.
Let me tell you, Home Office doesn't have a clue where you were 5 years ago. It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey. Plane, ferry, train, sailboat, ... it didn't matter. It seems like they have not been keeping the information very well.
Relevant current news: Home Office denying child benefits to 1000s of people because they had incomplete data of people vacation trips, so people were thought to have emigrated and never returned [0]. Some people who never even left (due to cancelled flights, denied boardings etc.) were also affected.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/01/hmrc-likely...
I guess this makes sense when you consider that there's an open border with Ireland. Though you'd think that the UK and Ireland could get together to track exits...
I agree though, the Home Office doesn't have a way of knowing where you were fore sure 5 years ago unless they got someone to go through your "days in and out of the UK" list and vetted/cross-referenced it. And even then it'd likely be incomplete and they'd have to guess.
My surmise is that they look at the level of effort you've put in to filling out that detail, and if the total days in/out isn't particularly a borderline case, then they just wave that bit through.
So the idea of trying to figure out exactly which day five years in the past you have to mention seems odd to me. If there's really no care being paid to the intervening time... well if you're trying to exploit a loophole like that I think I'd prefer that it's difficult... ?
Newer generations don't get how lucky they are to have been born into EU, appreciate it while it lasts.
Nations can sign Schengen, but are never forced to join the EU, nations can be EU members but are allowed to refuse the Schengen treaties.
I also happened to work in Switzerland, before they made cross-region agreements with EU, and it was lot of burecratic fun, explaining the situation regarding a Portuguese, living in France and working in Switzerland.
I get how lucky I was for 25% of my life expectancy.
Most people can't afford to travel to the Schengen Area for more than the visa-free limit of 90 days within a 180 day period.
Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling.
They do, actually.
It’s for collecting taxes, which supports local infrastructure.
Going to another country, living within their infrastructure and consuming their services, but pretending that you’re not working (and therefore not paying local taxes) is something they don’t want.
Digital nomads who abuse the situation like it because they get the benefits of a country (and city, region, etc) without having to contribute to their taxes. Getting California level pay, not paying taxes, and living in what’s basically a vacation destination is the digital nomad dream.
The options seemed to be:
- Get a job in France and get a work visa. This is very difficult due to economic protectionism.
- Come on a tourist visa and not work.
- Be provably independently wealthy and get some variety of golden visa. This meant proving that you had enough assets to live (lavishly I might add) long term without working.
No easy option for "I want to come to your country, get paid USD by a US company, but pay taxes to you!"
I think there have been some new developments regarding digital nomad visas since then. Still, seemed crazy given what a good arrangement it would have been for France.
Except few countries, all EU countries tolerate this
Despite being required to, most crossings I did recently did not use it, though
> Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling.
WTF are you talking about? The Schengen Area is right here and you don't need a visa to work anywhere else in it. That's the whole point.
But the article isn't talking about being an EU Citizen. It's talking about having to count how many days have been spent in the Schengen Area by a third-country national.
Citizens of certain other countries (e.g. the USA or UK) can enter the Schengen Area visa-free for tourism or limited work-related activities (for up to 90 days in a 180 day period), but are not allowed to just do whatever work they want to.
Note that the comment I replied to was talking about non-EU Citizens.
The article is content marketing, so I wouldn't be surprised if the pain points are being talked up somewhat (but who knows?)
UK officials seem to operate on vibes though, not obsessive precision - I witnessed missed presence days being successfully propped up with a good sob story, but I can imagine it still being useful if you need to appeal a case where vibe turned against you.
Then was a short rest between making oath and Brexit, and here we are at that shit again - spreadsheet is back, and there's a script for Schengen rolling days.
Back in 2000, entry to Canada was based on vibes. I had no idea what I was doing but looking back I don’t think they’d let someone in who forgets their DL, passport, and is on a “management consultant visa”.
I'm trying to think of some other reason they might want a specific moment rather than "pick your own instant within this span", but I can't think of anything. Even if it was to "make sure you aren't claiming the same time on two applications to different places", the person could have simply staggered the applications.
Whether this is _effective_ is a different question, but certainly it's gotten a lot harder in recent decades, even pre-Brexit.
The official agrees with me on the appointment date to actually submit the application, that is after cutoff date.
I put a signature on one sheet of paper, pay a thousand and go my way. The thing takes 15 min tops.
But it's continental Europe, not UK
A lot of this faff isn't relevant if you're not applying for any visas or citizenship. Which is most people, most of the time.
The obvious solution to most of these problems for most people is "don't cut it close to any of the limits". If you enjoy traveling a lot, that's definitely a problem, but most people don't cross borders often enough to run into this many corner cases.
This is only a small peek into the awful bureaucracy that will hit Europe if extreme right wing parties keep gaining popularity across the EU. The extra calculations Brexit imposes, but not for every country you travel through!
That’s true for many, but my passport isn’t very strong, so I still have to deal with a lot of paperwork for most transits.
There's probably special rules for those people in some places, which makes the situation even more complicated.
Convoluted rules like that smack of the ridiculous literacy tests for voting in the US during the Jim Crow era (if you don't know why the terms “grandfathering” and “grandfather clause” have fallen out of fashion in recent years, go have a poke around that bit of history which is where those terms originate).
Either that or it looks like a dysfunctional overly-complicated system like the mechanisms draw by Heath Robinson, which while better still isn't good. How many good (morally) and useful (i.e. to the economy) people are being rejected because of unnecessary complications like this?
I am confused whats British citizenship application to do with his, or any travel at all? That's not what you do regularly, I mean most people do not apply for citizenship in other countries ever in their lives? Or am I missing something?
I traveled before and I traveled after Schengen and the only thing that changed was not having to wait a bit at border control. What the article describe concerns a very small number of people, and exist only because of cheap air travel and internet
Note also that this isn't a travel requirement.
I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me.
sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country.
And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries.
I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.
Why not just make it a before-date if you care for someone having been here for a time? So just proof that you have been here X years ago or longer. Totally sufficient and much easier to have at hand.
But this is of course the point. It isn't policy where the state requires a certain thing and all people who fulfill the requirement have a shot. Instead the state makes the process of demonstrating the requirement hard on purpose as a means of reducing the people who get the benefit.
And this idea isn't just unique to the described process. It is everywhere. A bit of friction in certain places is placed there on purpose and it can also be a net positive for that friction to exist. But beyond a certain level it can turn people with rights into beggars.
Speaking of the EU, in Italy specifically for example the naturalization is really opaque and there's no clear process deadlines. While you can submit after 10 years of residence in Italy, with additional documentation from your country of origin, the process of actually getting a reply (denied or approved) may take usualy 5+ years, for some people even a decade because the people that should work on the papers forget them above a desk under a pile of dust for years.
Immagine having only third-world-like country citizenship. It's a travel nightmare.
If that's the first thing he thinks of while transiting through a UK airport, he deserves a citizenship, no questions.
This is about all the country-specific requirements for tax residency, visas, citizenship, etc.
But I don't know what downloading a border means. The title makes it sound like this is going to be about downloading national mapping data... If the author was looking for an evocative metaphor, I don't think this one works. Maybe it's supposed to refer to:
> It would be alright with a single source of truth, but all these facts are scattered across (semi)official websites and PDFs, and you're supposed to figure it out yourself.
But they got those all through... downloading. I.e. cURL.
> You can't cURL a border. But you can track your own state carefully enough that when the governments know the answer, so do you.
Maybe API would be a better term, but it's a clever.
All of these were people in low-paying services industries, jobs Europeans don't usually want (waiters, cleaners, etc).
The only ones that had issues with immigration were my qualified worker friends who got a work visa and then the company had layoffs while they were there, losing their sponsorship. People with masters degrees who had to scramble to find new work in 30 days or face deportation.
It's hard not to think that's intentional.
I have a nuanced opinion because it's a rather complex subject but it's just a weird thing to have seen happen. As a tourist I had to prove up and down I wasn't going to stay there only to see no one else cares outside the airports. There's obvious wage suppression going on with these policies but these waiters and cleaners also had college degrees from good institutions, probably more qualified than some citizens.
That's completely legal for some nationalities, at least in Germany. §41 AufenthV allows people from certain countries to come to Germany and apply for a visa there.
A separate paragraph allows people to convert a tourist visa to a residence permit if the reason for the residence permit appeared while they were visiting. For example, going through rounds of interviews, and being offered the job while you're visiting Germany as a tourist.
There are so many other paths, but navigating those options can be confusing.
The Ausländerbehörden are massively understaffed (well below 50% of what would be needed), and work distribution usually is that anything attached with a court deadline has absolute priority, anything from a lawyer comes next, and whatever comes from a generic person or company just gets shifted to "Ablage P" (the paper recycling bin).
If you are on a tourist visa you can't legally get a job then worm your way to a valid work/residency visa. I mean you can, just not legally.
This is how it works: you interview[2], get a job offer, sign it, then your employer applies for a work permit on your behalf. The only complicated part is collecting your own paperwork. You wait a few weeks/months for approval and move in. It's a lot easier than most people think. The permit is tied to your employment, though it can be transferred, but you cannot get a 'free employment' permit until after five years in the country.
For the EU as a whole, the Blue Card serves a similar purpose but is significantly more difficult to obtain.
[1] There is no skill/merit assessment like the USA, it's solely based on the salary threshold - basically delegates the skill assessment to the employer. Not every company has access to this program, the job must be advertised as including visa sponsorship.
[2] online. Flying over for a final round was common before COVID, I miss those days
To legally get a job yes, but that tends to not be super effective at stopping people, and even if the job itself is illegal, it can count as something that links you to the society where you want to regularize your situation.
Heavy "it depends on the country" since we're talking Europe-wide here.
Technically yes, but actually no, because you mostly need an employer to sponsor your work permit, unless you get yourself a residence permit that is not job-related.
Pretty much nobody does that in the USA (maybe by getting married? Prob not even that in Trump II), where I am. Come in an a tourist visa, stay over, manage to legalize your stay in a few years and then become a citizen. Nope.
I have a bunch of friends, with jobs ranging from bartenders to software developers, who've successfully were allowed to stay in the country after doing things that way, initially staying illegally and later regularized their situation.
It's unclear whether the author wrote all of this themselves, or if they outsourced a bunch of it to Claude. My experience with Claude was that it was terrible at writing code to do the math, even when I explained what the calculation needed to be, what the input was, and what the expected result was. It ultimately took starting a whole new project just to do the rolling window calculation, and then have that fed back in.
My biggest question for the author, if they happen to see this, is: how much manual testing validation did you do of the outputs the app produces? IE: Did you do the inputs + transformations = output calculations yourself as well, counting days on calendars, etc, to validate that the app is actually accurate? (That was the only way I developed any faith in solution I made for myself, which is way less impressive than your app). Regardless of whether you wrote the code yourself or not, a thorough test harness feels vitally important for an app like this.
And yes this kind of use-case is exactly where unit tests shine...
These aren't really that different. Consider the history of the earliest (non-assembly) programming languages, particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedcoding , as well as the ideas expressed by Lisp.
Indeed, not using unit tests and instead trying to manually test all the cases sounds crazy to me!
I'm sorry. I don't want to fight here, but you have literally just said you paid Claude to do the thinking for you (except for some math), yet you're talking about this like you're some kind of scientist; or that you've done this extensive, in-depth work.
You made an AI vibe-code an app in a week and now you're impressed someone else was able to do it better?
Am I missing something? Is it maybe just your writing style that makes it come across so "from your high horse"?
https://drobinin.com/apps/residency/
If I wasn't on android and decidedly sedentary at the moment, I'd love to see how it works.
Maybe because the author is trying to sound sleek and sexy, "look at me, jetset international traveller", although the topic is so nerdy and dull, and the bragging feels off-putting to me.
(My opinion. Did I need to share it? probably not. Flag away if you think so)
Digital nomads gonna digital nomad…
And it's not even a "sexy" problem.. it's bureaucracy!
People who enjoy travelling gonna travel…
There is no State Almighty judging you to the last dot of absurdly complicated rules (well, in 99.99% cases when you don't actively look for trouble). Like, if you overstayed Schengen visa for one day because you messed up with counting entry and exit days, but used it otherwise for its intended purpose, the border officer likely won't even notice. Or for tax residence, a lot of countries I know just take what you say about your trips at face value - especially when there is no way to check it.
Just relax. If you don't know how to count your days in Morocco because they changed the time zone in an inconvenient moment, the officer evaluating your documents doesn't know that too. It's truth and best effort that counts.
I've heard many stories of people overstaying their visa in the US by e.g. one day, by way of a mishap or honest mistake, and subsequentially being denied visas or turned away at border control. The effects of this can go on for years and years... it's basically zero tolerance
Anywhere else, less strict. Still can be problematic yes. And of course depends on the circumstances
Why is the US so awkward?
Instead, arrive a bit early to the airport, and analogously, don't run visas down to the last hour based on the minutiae of Moroccan timezones etc.
You're privileged if you're able to do so. In many occasions people have single-entry visas with one day leeway from tickets submitted to the consulate.
When that wasn't automated that might have been the case (not that its a good thing).
It's certainly not the case now that there is literally an API that tracks that.
I hope we will eventually get rid of both.
Now you need a lighter to set this all on fire, and we can see it grow in front of our eyes. The bigger the AI bubble grows, the more it will all come crashing down, and the next economic crisis will find all the EU countries (and not just those) ready for a far-right takeover. It's just a matter of time.
I often wonder what the world would look like if humans could fly like birds. There would be cages everywhere.
What kind of illegal immigration / criminal activity does a country prevent, or economic benefit / any other advantage does a country get by enforcing this kind of rule?
Also if your passport lasts for 10 years you've known when it's going to expire for quite a while, they're just expecting you to be responsible.
You are also assuming a point-to-point trip. While a citizen of a country usually cannot be denied entry to their own country, any countries you transit are under no obligation to allow you through on an expired passport.
tl;dr filters out people who may be problematic to deport.
- search it on a search engine -> google it
- fetch it from an API -> cURL it
The whole point of these arbitrary rules is entirely to make this sort of shenanigans impossible but to let in people who are using the system for the purpose it was designed.
That's why the rule about 'relevant to your travel' is vague. So that you can't weasel your way through it.
People who write this sort of app think border entry is two doors, allowed and denied. But there's also the guard who stabs people who ask awkward questions and their name is 'National Security'.
He explicitly says that none of his data on the app would convince an official.
It's actually relatively simple to follow the rules that lead you down the well estabilished residency paths if you do the opposite of what the article suggests and leave enough of a buffer for every required number, so you don't need to think about it and the precise count can be handwaved by the officials.
Conversly, if you try to minmax the rules, you might find that most important systems still have an arbitrary human decision maker, who simply decides whether to apply a complex ruleset to the letter, or to be lenient.
You don't need an app for that. You just behave like a normal person.
?? I'm a normal person, and I don't need to count my days in and out of a country, I just take vacations when I like.
If OP did that, they'd lose their visa.
It sounds like you've never known anyone on a green card, or waiting for citizenship, or on a visa that requires a certain number of days in the country.
> To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago.
This is an insane bureaucratic requirement (to have been in the country exactly 5 years on the day prior), and not someone the vast majority of people need to worry about. How does "just behave like a normal person" help keep you on the right side of multiple overlapping Kafkaesque requirements?
No amount of "behaving like a normal person" (whatever that means) is going to save you in that situation.
Which is entirely what the laws are trying to stop you doing.
Governments don't want you to be 'just inside', they want you to be well inside.
The number is, for example 159 days in a tax year not because they are happy if you're there 160 days but because they had to draw a line somewhere because text is necessarily precise.
FWIW I have been asked for this a couple of times and I always just included the transits that were stamped in my current passport. Maybe I got lucky but I got away with it...
This gets much murkier in the EU, or being a non-citizen with Global Entry traveling to the US, etc.
To get a driving license in Japan without having to retake the exam, I had to prove that I lived in the country that issued my license for at least 90 days after I got it (presumably because they had some issues with people getting licenses in jurisdictions that are... easier to get the licenses in.).
This was a _very_ non-trivial thing to do for a document I first got over ten years ago, in a country that is part of the Schengen zone.
But yeah I think the place where I got lucky is that nobody ever checked.
Airlines sometimes check for things during boarding. Those things are never rules outside the context of the airline.
I had an airline require once that I complete a form before boarding that, by the terms printed on the form, expired before the plane landed. That didn't matter to them.
Airlines are clueless. I don't know why they do their imaginary checks.
Nope. Plenty of countries still require 6 months' passport validity to enter.
> I had an airline require once that I complete a form before boarding that, by the terms printed on the form, expired before the plane landed. That didn't matter to them.
> Airlines are clueless. I don't know why they do their imaginary checks.
The airline doesn't give a shit about whether you can legally or practically enter the country they're flying you to. They care about whether they're going to be held liable to repatriate you at their own expense, and their processes are set up to ensure they avoid that. If the requirement on them is that they check your document before you board, they'll check your document before you board.
Me: Lifelong, native-born citizen of a western nation. 1 or 2 international trips of less than 2 weeks each year.
Author: Immigrant to his country of residence. Applying or soon to apply for citizenship or permanent residency. Has taken multiple, lengthy international trips and also appears to have had immigration status in different countries .
Conclusion: If you are more like me than the author then international travel will not require navigation of arcane and contradictory rules.
That doesn't seem to be a great argument in favour of crossing borders with this information stored locally on your device.
>Keeping it off my servers means nobody can demand I hand it over.
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that this is completely false.
[Edit] On second reading, I realise that he's just talking about him not being able to hand over the data. This is true. But the user can be forced to hand it over. So I retract that it's completely false, but it's still a very bad idea.
If I was concerned about this sort of thing when travelling, the only sensitive thing I would carry is a password in my head that grants me access to end-to-end encrypted data on some server.
Insanely impressive that it works even just well enough that more than just the developer finds use in it.
One coworker had lived her for many years on a string of temporary working visas. He was then eligible for a permanent one, and applied. However, while that was processing, he kinda was in limbo. Still legal to live and work here, but somehow wasn't guaranteed entry if he were to leave for a vacation / visit his home country/family. I don't know the exact details, but so weird how he suddenly was stuck here for months, with many delays. In the end he needed to travel for work, and our company sent a letter and his application got fast tracked.
But I'm only dealing with the requirements of two countries. The author mentioned five or six countries; I'm glad I'm only dealing with two.
US screws its expats in a big way.
The club of countries that do this includes: United States, Eritrea and Myanmar.
Isn't that the case only when country A is the USA? AFAIK, nearly all countries in the world tax only residents, not citizens, so in most cases you'd only have to fill tax paperwork (and pay taxes) for country B.
And since you are now filling in two tax returns for different countries, with different tax allowances across rental income and work income which interact in decidedly non-linear fashion, you probably need to make sure both country A and B have no confusion about where your work income was earned.
Having spent the last 8 years obsessively counting days across the UK and Finland (and every other country I have visited) exactly to account for this scenario, I am very sympathetic to attempts to solve this problem space!
I think that's how the JavaScript Temporal proposal works. Convert your instant to the timezone, make the comparisons/calculations, hope you didn't jump an hour due to summertime, convert back.
if you cant express it with the tools it gives you, it generally means youre making unsafe assumptions
But the trick here is: if you're relying on the details for your benefit then make 100% sure it's provable (though tbh legal proof is less - and different - than what your HN commenter might understand). Or just make it easy on yourself and don't rely on them
