Everything Walkable does, and nothing it doesn't

A loop from a distance

Choose how far you feel like walking — one kilometre to fifteen — and Walkable shapes a loop that starts and ends where you already are. It nudges you to turn back at the halfway point, so the distance you picked is the distance you walk.

Loops worth choosing between

Plan a route properly and you get several candidate loops rather than one verdict: each with its distance, a difficulty, the climb, and roughly what time you would finish. Shake the phone for a different set.

Somewhere to aim for

Not every walk is a loop. Set a destination and Walkable routes you there on foot instead, using walking paths rather than driving directions.

How the walk should feel

Direct, calm, scenic, flat, explorer, quiet, or surprise me. Walkable weighs the route towards the kind of walk you asked for, using what the map knows about each street.

A preference, not a promise — the map does not know everything about a street.

Never quite the same walk

Streets you have walked in the last fortnight are quietly deprioritised, so the loop from your own front door keeps changing. The area right around where you start is excluded from that signal, so home is never part of it.

The corners you would have walked past

Nothing here is a list of attractions to tick off. The route simply takes you down streets and through parks you had no particular reason to choose, and you notice what is on them.

Turn-by-turn guidance

The next manoeuvre, the distance to it, and the name of the street — on a full navigation screen or a compact card over the map, whichever you are looking at.

Off the route, and back on it

Wandering off is not an error. Walkable waits to be sure you have genuinely left the route rather than lost a moment of signal, then recalculates from where you actually are. There is a manual recalculate too, if you would rather ask.

Walking with no signal at all

Download the map region covering where you are going while you still have wifi, and the map draws, the route plans and the guidance runs with no connection and no roaming data. Recording a walk never needed a connection in the first place.

Offline regions do not cover everywhere yet. A region has to be downloaded before you leave signal.

The routing runs on your phone

There is no routing server. The engine that works out your walk is embedded in the app, so planning a route sends nothing anywhere — including the place you are standing.

A lock screen that says little

Guidance appears in the notification shade with the manoeuvre and the distance, plus rest and resume. Street names are hidden on the lock screen unless you turn them on, because a lock screen is read by whoever is nearby.

It admits when it cannot see

A weak or missing GPS fix outranks any turn instruction, so Walkable tells you it has lost you rather than guiding you from a stale position. There is a compass, with a calibration prompt when the phone needs one.

Photos, notes and voice notes

Keep a photo, a video, a written thought or a spoken one while you are walking. Each is pinned to the exact spot you kept it, and reads back as a quiet thread down the finished walk.

A walk you can replay

Watch any saved walk retrace itself at your own speed, with the things you kept surfacing as the marker reaches where you kept them. It reads your history and never touches GPS.

Every walk you have kept

A dated list you can narrow to this week, this month, or the walks with photos in them. Each opens onto its map, its numbers, and whatever you wrote — and you can rename or delete any of it.

Totals that add up quietly

Distance, time, walks, memories kept, and calculated calories. Numbers you can look at rather than a score you are being held to — nothing here ranks, averages or compares you to anyone.

Calories are calculated from distance, duration and an optional body weight. Not a medical figure.

Places you have wandered

The map at the top of the home screen fills in as you walk, and rolls up into the cities and countries you have covered. It is drawn entirely from your own history, on your own phone.

Your rhythm, learned locally

After a few walks Walkable knows roughly when you like to go and how far you usually get, and uses that for its greeting and its reminders. It is worked out from your walks and kept on the phone with them.

There is no account

No sign-up, no email, no password, no profile. You install the app and walk. There is nothing to log into, which means there is nothing of yours sitting on a server waiting to be breached.

Your walks stay on your phone

Walks, routes, photos, notes, places and settings are files in the app's private storage on your device. No analytics, no tracking, no location upload — a walk you record is not sent anywhere.

Backup that even we could not read

If you want a copy, Walkable can back up to a hidden folder in your own Google Drive, encrypted on the phone first with a recovery key that is shown to you once and never stored anywhere. It is off until you turn it on, twice.

Lose the recovery key and the backup cannot be opened — not by you, not by us. Write it down somewhere safe.

Sharing is something you do, deliberately

A share card, a temporary live link, a handoff to Google Maps: each exists only because you tapped it, that time. Share cards trim the ends of the route by default and leave the place name off, so a picture of your walk does not show where you live.