The plethora of default pin icons in place result lists at the moment is actually a deficiency in Arc’s use of Foursquare’s new database. Which is something I’m working to remedy over the next few updates.

Foursquare’s new database (which Arc now uses, since 3.12.0) doesn’t use the same place category ids as their old database. Which means that Arc’s mappings from ids to icons all broke. I’m having to go through the new category ids effectively one by one, hooking them up to Arc’s place icons.

But that doesn’t mean this feature request is a bad idea! Though I think what would probably make more sense is to allow for choosing an icon for private places that you add in Arc. Right now, if you add a private place in Arc, it gets given a default pin icon and you can’t change that. It would be great if we could!

Yeah, I totally agree about the private places!

However, there’s also situations where the category<->icon mapping doesn’t work out for some places that don’t really fit their categories (but were assigned the closest category possible on Foursquare), would be cool to be able to make them better on a per-place basis, but I see how that’s a lot of work (especially if correction sharing is in scope for this).

But on the other hand, if/when Foursquare change their database next time, we’d just be able to quickly assign the new icons on the spot, making the migration easier in the users 🙂