Your main map is the record of everywhere you have been, and the only one your crews ever see. A scratch map starts empty — for a camping trip, or a town you want to watch fill in from nothing — and never leaves this phone.

Without it there is nothing to uncover — the whole app is the ground you walk and drive over. It is kept for you so a lost phone does not cost you it, and shown to nobody unless you join a crew.

1 · Turn it on for Safari

Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services. Make sure it is on, then find Safari Websites in the list and set it to While Using the App.

2 · Allow it for this site

Back in Safari, tap the Ａａ button at the left of the address bar, choose Website Settings, and set Location to Allow.

3 · Reload

Pull down to refresh. You should see the ground clear around you within a few seconds.

Uncovering ground

Just go somewhere. The map clears behind you as you move, and stays cleared. How far you can zoom out grows with how much you have covered.

Keeping a place

Press and hold on the map. Keep holding to slide it exactly where you want, then let go. Tap a place to name it, write a note, copy its coordinates, or open it in Maps.

Camera

Free leaves the map where you put it. Assist brings you back when you drift off, and every so often anyway. Locked holds you centered.

Compass

The dial always points at true north. Tap it to let the cursor show which way you are facing; tap again and the whole map turns with you; once more puts north back at the top.

Map data

The world underneath comes from OpenStreetMap, drawn by people who map their own places, served as tiles by OpenFreeMap using OpenMapTiles. The colours and styling are ours; the geography is theirs, and crediting them is a condition of using it.

Crews

A crew combines everybody’s map. You keep driving your own; theirs fills in beside it, outlined in their colour, and where you have both been the line goes dashed in both. Start one and read the code out, or type someone else’s. Each crew is separate — the people in one never see the people in another.

What leaves this phone

Two different things, and they stay different.

Backup. Every map is kept on the server so that losing this phone, or clearing its browser data, does not cost you years of driving. Nobody else can read any of it — not your crews, not the people you drive with every day. It is yours, kept for you. You can switch it off, and then nothing is uploaded and nothing survives this phone.

Sharing. Only a crew shares anything, and only ever the one map you have marked as the one your crews see. A scratch map is backed up like everything else and shown to nobody.

What travels is the set of squares you have uncovered, and nothing else: no times, no speeds, no route, no record of when you were anywhere. The app throws your position away the moment it has marked the ground, so there is no trail of your day to send. Leave a crew and they stop seeing you at once.

Live cursors are separate, and you can switch them off. With them on, a crew sees where you are while the app is open — which is a larger thing to hand over than where you have driven, so it is its own decision. Only your latest position is ever stored, overwritten each time: there is no history of it kept anywhere, and turning it off deletes what is there rather than hiding it.

With no crew, nobody can see where you have been — not even me. Your maps are still kept, so a new phone can have them back.