It doesn’t matter whether you’re visiting a new city or at home—sometimes you just want to take a walk, but you don’t know where to go. A new, free iPhone app called Strolly is the perfect solution. Open the app and it will create three walking routes, usually a loop, near your current location: one short, one long, and one in between. You can flip between the routes and choose the one you like.
That’s it—there are no turn-by-turn directions, and you only get three suggestions every day. The app aims to include local points of interest and to not go over the same road twice. The loops are created entirely on the device, meaning there’s no data about your current location being sent to a server somewhere.
There are also no ads, aside from a small button in the settings you can use to send a the developers a tip if you like. There may be advanced paid features later, according to their announcement post, but for now it’s one of those simple apps built for a specific person by only a couple of people (Natalia Panferova and Matthaus Woolard).
How Strolly works
Credit: Justin Pot
Once you do, you will see a few different options. I tried the app out in a few different locations, and typically it would serve me up one walk around 15 minutes, one walk around 30 minutes, and another around an hour, with some variation. If you know you’re not likely to want to take very long walks, you can adjust your settings so you will be given any combination of long, medium, and short walks.
Credit: Justin Pot
You can switch between the different randomly generated walks by flipping through the cards in the bottom-left corner. You can also tap and hold the cards to either pin a walk—saving it for later—or to wipe out the current walks and generate more. There’s also a feature that allows you to mark areas that aren’t actually great for walking, which will train the application not to include such areas going forward, though again, the information itself remains local to your device and is not uploaded to a server.
Overall, Strolly is a very simple app, but that’s the point. Give it a shot next time you want to take a walk and don’t know exactly where to go.
