How do you record a walk with the phone in your pocket?

A dog walk is not a workout. Nobody looks at the phone for forty minutes; it sits in a pocket while your hands hold a leash and a bag. An app that needs the screen on will record the first two hundred metres and that is it.

Tropy on Android runs a service that keeps collecting your position with the screen off and the app out of sight. The notification bar shows the whole time that a walk is being recorded — the system requires it, and it is simply good manners: there is no tracking you do not know about.

How it works

Press start and pick who is coming. Phone in the pocket. Back home, press finish — or someone at home does it for you from the dashboard, because the walk is shared. You get a map with the route, distance, time and pace. Poop and pee are one tap along the way, and a photo goes straight from the camera into the walk.

Before your first walk the app checks whether the phone is saving battery at Tropy's expense. Some brands — Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei — kill background services after a few minutes, and afterwards it looks like our bug. One tap exempts the app from that; nothing else changes.

Honesty over a pretty line

Recording can break: the signal disappears between buildings, the system kills the service, someone declined the location permission. Tropy does not draw in the missing part. If there is a gap of more than a hundred metres between two points, the walk screen says so. A walk without a route is marked differently from a walk logged afterwards — they are two different things, and you can see which is which.

What changes in a week

• The dog's distance adds up by itself. After a month you know how much it really walks, not how much you think it does.
• Phone left at home or battery died? Log the walk afterwards — with an honest label.
• A walk you forgot to finish reminds you after a while instead of hanging open until the evening.

What we deliberately do not do

We do not ask for "always" location, only during a walk. There is no tracking outside start and finish. And there is no sharing of routes outside the household — they start at your front door.