Anonymous walks now come home with you

One of the best things about WalkSpy is that you can go live without creating an account first. Pull out your phone, tap GO LIVE, walk. No signup wall between you and the street.

But there was a cruel catch we only recently understood from the inside, by doing exactly what a new walker does. Walk anonymously, then decide you like it, then tap Log in. Instead of a login page, WalkSpy dropped you on an account dashboard for a user named Anonymous, with no password fields anywhere and no way out. The app thought you were already signed in, because behind the scenes an anonymous walker is a kind of temporary account. Every door that said Log in or Sign up quietly bounced you back.

Today that whole trap is gone, and the flow works the way you always assumed it did.

Walk first, sign up whenever

• Log in and Sign up are always reachable. Anonymous walkers now see the same Log in and Sign up buttons as everyone else, in the header, the menu, and the mobile drawer, and both pages load normally.
• Your walks follow you. Sign in to an existing account and every walk you recorded anonymously on that device transfers to it automatically. Create a brand new account and the same thing happens. Even resetting your password brings them along.
• My Walks says the quiet part out loud. If you are anonymous, the My Walks page now tells you your walks are not saved to an account yet and offers both options right there. No more finding out the hard way after clearing your browser.

Honest failures on GO LIVE

We found a rare but nasty failure: if the server hiccuped at the exact moment you started a walk, the app would carry on as if you were live. Camera on, map moving, everything looking healthy, and none of it being saved. You would finish an hour later with nothing.

Now, if the walk cannot be created, GO LIVE stops, tells you, and lets you try again. Stop and pause failures report themselves honestly too. A failure you can see beats a success that never happened.

The paperwork, done properly

WalkSpy now has real Terms of Use, a real Privacy Policy, a Legal index and a Contact page, linked from the footer and from signup. The privacy policy covers the things that actually matter on a platform like this: what happens to your GPS traces, your video, your payment details, and how to get everything deleted. Speaking of which, account deletion from Edit Profile works properly again, as does saving your profile at all, which had a way of quietly failing for some walkers.

A few smaller ones while we were in there: password changes now confirm your current password first, profile saves no longer fail for walkers who never picked a home country, and applying to a walk request from the classic listing page submits properly again with an actual Place bid button.

Go walk. Sign up whenever you feel like it. Your walks will be waiting.