Walkabout is a walking app for Android and iOS that works where the signal doesn't. Download a region once and the map, the paths, the place names and the elevation are all on your phone: you can record a walk, find where you are and search for a village on the far side of a hill with the radio off and the phone in flight mode. It records with a foreground service rather than background-location permission, keeps every walk you record in a database on your own device, and asks you for no account, no email address and no subscription. There is nothing to log in to, nothing watching what you do with it, and one day a one-off price rather than a monthly one.
What it does
- Works offline properly. Not a cache that expires — a region pack you download and keep, with the basemap, terrain, contours, paths and a searchable place-name index inside it.
- Records walks accurately. Distance, time, pace and climb, with elevation read from the phone's barometer where there is one rather than guessed from GPS.
- Records in your pocket. A foreground service and an ongoing notification, so a walk survives the screen going off — without asking for background-location permission.
- Keeps your walks yours. Every walk is stored in a database on your phone. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to.
United Kingdom first
The first region packs cover the UK, and the beta assumes UK-based walkers. That is a deliberate choice about doing one country properly — right-of-way paths, national trails, sensible place-name search — before spreading thin. Other regions follow once the UK packs are good.
What it doesn't do
No accounts. No adverts. No analytics, no crash reporting, no third-party trackers, no advertising ID. No subscription — the plan is a free trial and then a single one-off purchase that includes every future update. The app makes exactly one kind of network request: downloading map packs from our own server. The privacy policy sets out what that server can see and what it does with it, in plain language.
Getting it
Walkabout is in closed testing on Google Play and is not yet publicly available. iOS follows. If you would like to be told when there is something to install, or you want to join the beta, email hello@walkabout.fit.