Get lost
on purpose.

Maps has one opinion: the fastest way there. Detour has the opposite one. It gives you a direction and a distance, and lets you find your own way through it.

Get it on Google Play

Free and complete. No account, no ads, no subscription, and no internet permission.

Eleven minutes, head down, arrived, saw nothing.

Navigation optimised the walk out of walking. Detour puts the deciding back in your hands: it knows compass bearings, not streets, so which alley you take and which side of the road you cross is a choice you make over and over, the whole way round.

How a walk goes

An hour, a mood, and no route at all

Set the length, pick a mood, press Wander, and wait for the receiver to find you. Everything after that happens outside, with the phone mostly in your pocket.

One

Say what you have

Twenty minutes to three hours, and one of five moods. Quiet takes long lazy legs. Lively turns every corner it can.

Two

Take the bearing

North east, three hundred metres. A pulse in your pocket says a new one has landed, so you can keep your eyes on the street.

Three

Get it wrong

Walk into a dead end, a canal, a locked gate. Detour recomposes from wherever you actually stand. There is no wrong turn to be scolded for.

Four

Come back changed

Your own trail draws itself as an ink sketch, with the quests you finished marked where you finished them.

The walk screen: a black compass card with a tangerine needle, the word East, and seventy metres to go. — One bearing at a time. The card turns with you, and the trail below fills in as you go.

The finished walk: the route drawn as an ink sketch on cream paper with two quest marks on it. — The sketch is the reward. Forty seven minutes, drawn from the ground you covered.

The ground covered map: every forty metre square you have stood in, shaded tangerine, with the walks drawn over them. — Every forty metre square you have stood in, shaded in. Months of walks stack into a private atlas.

Little quests, for noticing

Three hundred and sixty two cards, written to be done in under a minute, in public, without spending anything. Two to six arrive on an hour's walk. These are real ones.

Find something older than you.

Follow a cat for one block if a cat appears.

Stand where two smells meet.

Put your hand flat on a wall older than your grandmother.

Find a puddle worth photographing and do not photograph it.

Find a sign that has been corrected by hand.

Find the join between two centuries.

Find a queue and work out what it believes in.

Answer with a line of writing, or simply do it and tap done. The ones you love can be starred so they come back.

What it is, and what it is not

The honest version, because a walking app that oversells itself sends people somewhere they did not want to be.

It is

A compass that composes the next bearing from where you are, how long you have left, and which ground you have never stood in.
A memory of your own walked ground, which is why it can lean you toward the unfamiliar.
A journal of trails, quests and one line about what you noticed.
Entirely offline. It works in a foreign city with the data switched off.

It is not

A map. There are no streets on the screen and no turn by turn directions.
Able to know that a bearing meets a river, a motorway or a private gate. Press "Not that way" and it hands you another.
A fitness tracker. It counts nothing at you and sets no goals.
A judge of which streets are safe. That judgement stays yours, and it will recompose from wherever you turn around.

Your wandering stays yours

No network

Detour does not request the internet permission. It cannot upload where you walked, because Android will not let it open a connection at all. The permission list on the Play page is the proof.

Foreground only

Location is read while a walk is open on your screen and stops the moment it ends. There is no background location. Approximate location is too coarse to measure a walk with, so Detour says so and offers to hand you bearings you walk by eye instead.

Yours to take

Export everything as JSON, or as a plain text journal that reads like a notebook. Put a copy back later from that same file. Erase the lot in two taps.

No walls

Every mood, all three hundred and sixty two cards, the journal and the coverage map are in the free app. There is nothing to unlock.