What's new

Sharing: views, links that open the app, report cards

Planning a walk is a group activity; the map now travels. This update is being tested and goes to Google for review next.

New

• The web map's position and zoom now live in its address — zoom anywhere and the URL in the bar is a link to that exact view. (Already live on the web.)
• Share this view: a share button on the app's map sends that same link through Android's share sheet.
• Shared map links open the app directly at that position when it's installed, the web map otherwise.
• Signal reports can be shared as an image — the coloured distance bar, the dead zones and the route name on one card, sized for a group chat.
• This page.

Far fewer false dead-zone alarms, and stranded walks recovered

The headline is a correction: the app used to warn about dead zones you'd never notice. It was tested against real recorded walks and re-tuned until the false alarms went and the real gaps stayed.

Corrections

• The "no signal" cutoff was -110 dBm — the industry planning number. Real phones hold calls well below that; one test loop produced five warnings while calls carried on through four of them. The floor is now -120 dBm, learned from recorded walks, and alerts weigh signal quality (SINR) as well as strength.
• Recorded walks could get stuck on the phone and never back up to your account. They now re-upload themselves, and recordings stranded by earlier versions are recovered on update.

New

• Alerts look ahead along your route, so one dead zone warns once — not once per bend.
• Clearer vibrations: a falling buzz walking into a gap, a rising buzz when signal returns, tellable apart with the phone in a pocket.

Live walk sharing, airplane-mode alerts, tougher recording

The first additions after launch, shaped by the first users' questions.

New

• Watch my walk: a private link someone at home opens in any browser — no app, no account. Optional PIN. The link stops working when the walk ends.
• Airplane mode: with the radio off to save battery, the app still warns from the map's predictions when you're walking into or out of expected dead ground.
• Recordings survive more: walks interrupted by permission changes or a killed app resume rather than vanish.
• After stopping a recording, the map flies to your track so you can see the walk you just did.

First public release on Google Play

The baseline: offline topographic maps of the UK with predicted coverage for EE, Vodafone, Three and O2, a validated mast map, dead-zone warnings while you walk, GPS track recording with real signal measurements, and the option to share those measurements anonymously so the map gets more honest with every walk.

Forty-odd internal versions

The map itself came first: the basemap rendered from OpenStreetMap with real coastline and field boundaries, contours from the Ordnance Survey, rights of way, 3D terrain, the mast database validated by line-of-sight against terrain, and the full July 2026 tile refresh with named crags. Then recording, cell info, offline corridors, and the GPS filtering that keeps tracks honest — rebuilt from research after the first version deleted half of a perfectly good 20-mile walk.