FOG vs Walksy

Both apps hide the world map under fog and clear it as you walk. Walksy wraps that idea in a game with streaks, daily goals, levels and leaderboards. FOG deliberately does not. It is a permanent record of where you have been, and nothing else.

The short answer

If you are looking for a Walksy alternative, the useful question is not which app clears fog better. Both clear fog. The question is whether you want a game attached to your walking.

• Choose Walksy if the game is the point. Streaks, daily step goals, XP, levels, badges, guilds, leaderboards and rare landmark finds all give you a reason to go out today rather than tomorrow.
• Choose FOG if you want the map and only the map. No streaks. No daily goals. No leaderboard. You walk, the fog lifts where you walked, and it stays lifted.

Everything below about Walksy comes from its own store listing and its website. Everything about FOG comes from us. Where we could not verify something, we say so instead of guessing.

What Walksy is

Walksy: Fog Map Walking Game is listed on both the App Store and Google Play, free to download with in-app purchases. Its own description puts the idea plainly: "Walk to uncover it." A fog covers the map, and every step clears some of it.

Around that core it stacks a full game layer. From the store listing and the Walksy site, these are the named features:

• Step, distance, pace, calorie and active-time tracking, with insights by day, week, month and year.
• Daily step goals, streaks and walk history.
• Landmarks discovered as you walk, graded by rarity from common local spots to rare finds.
• Sector capture, where areas you claim add to a total.
• Guilds you can join or create, leaderboards for steps, distance and sectors cleared, and challenges against friends.
• XP, levels, achievements, badges, and a character you customise with equipment slots.

On price, the App Store listing shows one-off purchases such as character unlocks alongside monthly, yearly and lifetime subscription options. Check the store for current pricing in your region, since that changes. Its App Store privacy label lists precise location as data linked to you, and fitness data, coarse location, email address and crash data as data not linked to you.

That is a real product doing a real thing, and it is doing it well enough that people who want a game should probably go and get it. Nothing below is a criticism of it.

Side by side

Verified rows only. Anything we could not confirm from a store listing or an official site is marked as such rather than filled in.

Who should pick Walksy

Pick Walksy if you already know that you respond to game loops. Plenty of people genuinely do, and pretending otherwise would be bad advice.

• You want a reason to walk today specifically, and a streak counter supplies one.
• You like a target. A daily step goal that fills up is a good target.
• You want other people involved, whether that is a guild, a leaderboard position, or beating one friend over a week.
• You enjoy collecting graded finds. Turning up a rare landmark on an ordinary street is a small, real pleasure.
• You want the fitness numbers too: pace, calories, active time, charts across the year.

If you read that list and nodded at most of it, install Walksy. FOG will feel empty to you, because it is deliberately empty of all of it.

Who should pick FOG, and why the missing features are the point

FOG is a fog of war walking map with no streaks and no daily goals. That is a decision, not a gap in a roadmap.

A streak is a debt. The moment you have one, the app owns a small piece of every day, and the day you break it you feel worse than you would have if you had never installed anything. Daily goals do the same job on a shorter clock. They turn a walk, which is a nice thing you did, into a task you either completed or failed.

FOG will not punish you for a week indoors. Get ill, work late, travel somewhere with no walking in it, come back after ten days, and the map is exactly as you left it. Nothing decayed. Nothing reset. No red number waiting for you. The streets you revealed are permanent, and the app has no opinion about the gap.

What is left is a record. Every street you have physically walked is lit, and it stays lit. Over months that becomes the actual shape of your life: the routes home, the one park you always cut through, the odd bright cluster from a city you visited once. A map of everywhere you have walked is a different kind of object from a scoreboard, and it ages better.

FOG is not featureless. Ranks climb as you cover ground, from Wanderer up to Voyager. Countries, regions and named places accumulate, but only by standing in them, never by tapping. Each city you have walked shows the percentage of it you have lit up. Every one of those is a description of something you did. None of them expire.

Price, privacy, and what happens to your data

FOG is free to explore. One single purchase, USD $5.99, unlocks unlimited ranks, every character and history import. There is no subscription and there never will be. You pay once and the app is yours.

On privacy, FOG has no account, no sign-up, no cloud, no analytics, no ads and no tracking. The map never leaves the phone. There is no server holding a copy of everywhere you walk, because there is no server. You can export your data at any time and take it with you if you stop using the app.

This is the honest trade behind the missing features. Leaderboards and guilds need a server and an identity to hang scores on. Once your walking history sits on someone else's machine next to an email address, the privacy story changes shape. Walksy makes the other choice, which is a reasonable choice for a social game to make, and its App Store privacy label states what it collects. FOG makes this one, and the cost is that you will never compete with anyone.

Bringing years of past walks with you

Switching apps usually means starting from a black screen. FOG's paid unlock includes history import, so it does not have to.

Export your Google Timeline data, or gather GPX files from whatever tracked you before, and import them. Years of past walks appear on the map immediately, drawn the same way as anything you walk tomorrow. If you have had location history switched on for a decade, that first import is probably the most interesting thing the app will ever show you. There is a full walkthrough in import Google Timeline into a map.

We could not find any mention of importing past data, GPX files or Google Timeline in Walksy's store listing or on its site, so we make no claim either way about it.

FOG works for walking, running and riding, and it works anywhere on Earth. Background exploring keeps revealing streets with the app closed and the screen off, so there is nothing to remember to press. You can get it on the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

FOG is free to explore. No account, no subscription, and your map never leaves your phone.

free to explore · one purchase unlocks everything · never a subscription