What is Walkabout?
Walkabout turns your everyday steps into a virtual walk through real streets around the world. Choose a city, walk in real life, and watch your progress advance through landmark-rich routes using your Apple Health step count.
Why we built it
We wanted a calm alternative to gamification-heavy fitness apps: no streak pressure, badges, or fake progress bars. Every walk unlocks the next real place, with imagery from Apple Maps Look Around, so a routine walk becomes a small daily journey.
Features
- Six curated city routes: Tokyo, Paris, New York, London, Rome, and Madrid
- HealthKit-powered step syncing, including background updates
- Real street imagery at each checkpoint via MapKit Look Around
- Home screen widget with today’s steps and current destination
- Travel journal of places you have passed
- All routes are free; supported by a non-personalized banner ad
How it was built
Walkabout is a native SwiftUI app for iPhone, using HealthKit for steps, MapKit for routes and Look Around snapshots, and WidgetKit for the home screen widget. RevenueCat Ads is integrated for ad revenue measurement. Snapshot caching is temporary and limited to the next checkpoints so imagery stays fresh and respects Apple Maps usage requirements.
The hardest parts were making step progress feel immediate while keeping the app reliable in the background, and keeping the displayed place name and street image in sync. We solved that with checkpoint-based updates and atomic commits to the shared widget cache.
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