Your walks now actually stay live

We have to start with the honest part: for too long, walking on WalkSpy was unreliable in a particular cruel way. You would tap GO LIVE, head out, walk for an hour, come home, and only then discover that the broadcast had quietly died after two minutes. Nobody told you. The camera kept showing video on your screen so it felt fine. The map kept your route. And it was all local, never reaching anyone. That feeling of "this thing does not actually work" was the single biggest reason walkers tried us once and never came back.

Today we are shipping the work that fixes that. Not one thing, ten things, all aimed at the same goal: when you say you are going live, you are actually going live, and you can tell at a glance.

What you will notice as a walker

Your screen stays on. This is the single biggest fix. Most "broadcast died after two minutes" stories were really "phone screen turned off, browser throttled the tab, WebRTC connection silently disconnected, walker found out an hour later." We now ask the OS to keep the screen awake the entire time you are live. Your screen does not time out, the connection stays open, the GPS keeps reporting.

A health pill in the top bar. Look at the top of your phone any time and you will see a small colored dot: green for healthy, yellow for "something is slow but we are still on", red for "we lost the connection." The label spells out what is happening: "Live", "Reconnecting", "Upload slow", "GPS slow", "Off-air".

A loud alarm if it goes red. If something does break, you do not find out an hour later anymore. We pulse a full-width red banner across the top, vibrate your phone, and play a short tone, so a walker with the phone in their pocket knows the moment it happens. Tap the banner and we retry the connection right then.

Auto-reconnect when the network blips. WiFi to cellular handoff, dead spots in coverage, a tower that hiccupped. We now retry the broadcast automatically, five times with growing waits between tries. You see "Reconnecting…" instead of nothing. Most of the time you do not need to do anything; we get back online before you noticed.

A system notification when you switch apps. If you background the WalkSpy tab to check Maps or take a phone call, your phone shows a small notification: "Your walk is paused. Return to WalkSpy to keep recording." So the moment your screen lights up for any reason, you see that notification and remember.

A welcome-back banner when you return. If you were away for more than 30 seconds, when you come back you get a friendly message telling you how long you were paused and that we are reconnecting now. No silent gaps, no confusion.

What you will notice as a watcher

The video does not just freeze and give up. Old behavior: any blip, the player put up a sad satellite-dish graphic and stayed there. New behavior: a "Reconnecting…" overlay with a spinner, then we try to come back. Six attempts with growing waits, just like the publisher side. Most of the time we recover and you keep watching.

A live-pill above the player that shows the same green / yellow / red state, so a viewer who scrolled down or has the player partly off-screen still knows the broadcast is healthy.

What we did on our end

The walker-side fixes are great, but devices break, networks drop, browsers crash. So we also built a server-side safety net: every minute, WalkSpy looks for live walks whose phones have stopped sending data, marks them ended honestly, and emails the walker with exactly when we lost contact and what was preserved. No more zombie walks pretending to be live. No more walkers wondering what happened.

For Red5-savvy operators: a publishStop webhook now ends walks within a second of the publisher actually disconnecting, instead of waiting for the per-minute reaper.

WalkSpy as an app on your phone

The most reliable way to walk on WalkSpy is to install it as an app. Open WalkSpy in your phone's browser, then:

• On Android (Chrome): when the install prompt appears, tap Install. (We will nudge you with a small "Install WalkSpy" toast at the right moment.)
• On iOS (Safari): tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. We surface a one-time hint on the start-walk page reminding you of these exact taps.

Once installed, WalkSpy launches in standalone mode (no browser chrome), survives screen-off better, and feels like the app it always wanted to be.

What is coming next

Two pieces are waiting on small infrastructure work:

Push notifications when the browser is closed. Right now you get a system notification while WalkSpy is open and your tab is backgrounded. We have already built the foundation for true push notifications that reach you even when WalkSpy is fully closed; one library install away from going live.

A native iOS wrapper, eventually. Web on iOS has fundamental limits when the screen is genuinely off. A small native shell unlocks proper background streaming, persistent notifications, and background GPS. Worth a real conversation when the web reliability ceiling is hit, which it will be eventually.

Try it again

If you tried WalkSpy in the past and it let you down, we hear you. Today is the day to give it another go. Open WalkSpy on your phone, tap GO LIVE, and walk somewhere. We are betting you make it through the whole walk this time.