Detour
Get lost on purpose.
Detour does not know the streets. It knows bearings. It hands you a direction and a distance, you find your own way through it, and it composes the next one from wherever you actually ended up.
- It points, you choose. Head north-east for about three hundred metres. Which alley, which side of the road, which detour inside the detour: yours.
- It remembers where you have been. Your own trail becomes a map of walked ground, and the next bearing leans toward the parts you have never stood in.
- It asks you to notice things. Hundreds of small quests, arriving a few times a walk. Find something older than you. Follow a cat for one block if a cat appears.
Where your walks live. On this phone, in this app, and nowhere else. Detour has no internet permission, so it cannot upload your location even if it wanted to. Android will show you that in the permission list.
It needs location while you walk, because a walking app that cannot tell whether you walked is a stopwatch. It tracks only while the app is open on your screen. There is no background location.
Set out
Where would you rather not know?
How long have you got?
What sort of hour is it?
Journal
Your atlas of noticing
No walks yet. The first one is the hard one, and it is forty five minutes long.
The deck
Every card in it
Written to be done in under a minute, in public, without spending anything. A few arrive on every walk. You can read the whole deck here, and star the ones you want back.
Settings
Preferences
Buzz for the turns
Detour pulses the moment a new bearing lands, so you can keep your eyes on the street. The alphabet is six short patterns and takes about two minutes to learn.
On the walk
What Detour knows
Your walks, the ground you have covered and these preferences are written to this device's private app storage. Nothing is uploaded, because the app has no internet permission at all. Take a copy whenever you like, and put that copy back if you ever need it.
What it cannot do
Detour has no street map, so it cannot tell you that a bearing runs into a canal, a motorway or a locked gate. When one does, press Not that way and it will hand you another. It does not know which streets are lit or busy. You are the one with eyes: if somewhere feels wrong, turn around, and the next bearing will be composed from wherever you are.
Detour. Free, complete, and quietly on your side.
45m left
0 m
Finding you.
Standing still and outdoors helps. This can take half a minute.
North east
300 m
A small quest
End the walk?
The walk you are on is always the walk. Finishing early is not failing at it.
The walk you took