Walk Jakarta and see what you have really covered
FOG hides the entire world map under fog. Every street you physically walk clears for good. In Jakarta that includes the narrow gang behind the main road, which most maps ignore.
The shape of the walk
Jakarta is flat. Almost the entire city sits on a coastal plain a few metres above sea level, crossed by canals and the Ciliwung river. Nothing here will make your legs hurt. The difficulty is entirely about heat, traffic and the state of the pavement.
The street structure is two-layered, and this is the thing that makes the city interesting to map. There are the big arterial roads: Jalan Sudirman, Jalan Thamrin, Jalan Gatot Subroto, wide, fast, lined with towers. And then behind them, filling every block, is a dense web of gang, the narrow residential lanes of the kampung neighbourhoods, often too small for a car and completely invisible if you only ever travel by road.
Walking the arterials gives you long straight lines. Walking the lanes gives you the texture. The second is much slower and much more interesting.
A concrete route
Start at the Selamat Datang monument at the Bundaran HI roundabout and walk south down Jalan Thamrin, which continues as Jalan Sudirman. The pavements along this corridor have been widened and are genuinely good, which is not true of most of the city. Follow it to the Semanggi interchange, then loop back north through Menteng, the old low-rise garden district, where the streets are leafy, curved and quiet by Jakarta standards.
For something completely different, go to Kota Tua in the north. The old Batavia core around Fatahillah Square is compact, colonial, and walkable in a way the rest of the city is not. From there you can continue north to Sunda Kelapa harbour. That corner clears fast and looks satisfying because the blocks are small.
On a Sunday morning, Car Free Day closes Thamrin and Sudirman to traffic. It is by far the best few hours in the week to cover the central spine on foot.
Why the fog is hard work here
Jakarta is one of the largest urban areas on Earth and it is not built for pedestrians. Pavements disappear, get occupied by parked motorbikes and food carts, or turn into a covered drain you would rather not step through. Crossing a six-lane arterial can require walking several hundred metres to a footbridge. All of that means your cleared area grows slowly relative to the effort.
What makes it rewarding is the kampung. Because those lanes are so dense, twenty minutes of wandering one clears a surprisingly solid block of map. You get a real sense of having covered a place rather than having drawn a line through it. This is also where FOG shows you something a road map cannot, since many of those lanes are not routes anyone would ever hand you.
Expect your map to look like a few thick corridors with dense clusters hanging off them. Filling the city is not on the table. Filling your own district is.
Heat, rain and signal
Heat. It is hot and humid every day of the year, with the sun overhead near midday. Early morning is the only comfortable window for a long walk. Evenings are cooler but the traffic is at its worst.
Rain. The wet season runs roughly November to March and the rain is heavy. Flooding closes streets in low-lying districts, and some lanes become genuinely impassable. Plan around it.
Signal. Between the towers along Sudirman the position can wander, as it does in any dense high-rise corridor. In the low-rise kampung areas it tracks well.
FOG keeps revealing with the app closed and the screen off, so you can put the phone away. No account, no cloud, no ads, no analytics, and the map never leaves your device.
Questions people actually ask
Do motorbike or car trips count?
FOG is for walking, running and riding. It is built around going somewhere under your own power, not for filling the map from a vehicle.
Will it record the small lanes?
Yes. FOG clears fog based on where you physically go, not on which roads a map knows about, so kampung lanes reveal like any other street.
How much does the unlock cost?
USD 5.99, one time. It unlocks unlimited ranks, every character, and history import from Google Timeline exports and GPX files. No subscription.
Is my location data sent anywhere?
No. There is no account, no sign-up, no cloud and no tracking. Your map stays on the phone and you can export it yourself.
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