Walka Talka

What the app does

You tap Start, walk the dog, and tap End. While the walk is running, your household and the lookouts you invited can open a live map and see where you are, how far you have gone, and how much battery your phone has left. When the walk ends they are told, and the route goes into your household's shared walk log.

If you stop moving for longer than the time you set, the app asks if you are OK. Answer it and nothing else happens. If you don't answer, the people looking out for you are told within about three minutes, and the live map they open shows where you are and your phone's battery level. If your phone goes quiet instead, they are told that too, with the last battery level it reported, so a flat phone reads differently from something worse. A walk can end itself when you get back inside your home zone, and every walk closes out at three hours.

Nobody sees where you are until you tap Start

There is no background location collection between walks and no "always" permission. Collection begins when you tap Start. Your phone stops tracking when you tap End, and the last few points it had already collected finish uploading so the route is complete. The live feed comes down as soon as End reaches the server, no more than about three hours later even if the phone never reconnects. Nobody can start a walk on your behalf and nobody can turn your location on remotely.

The one exception is the locate button. When you set your home zone or save a place, it takes a single fix while you are looking at the screen.

Nobody else can end your walk for you, either. It ends when you tap End, when you get back inside your home zone, or at three hours. Someone following along who knows you are home can quiet their own alerts, and that is all it does. I didn't want a worried relative's mis-tap to take down the safety net of someone who is still out.

Who can see a walk

There are two ways in. Your household is the people you share dogs and a walk log with, and they see your walks live and afterwards. A lookout is invited one person at a time and sees live walks only.

Lookouts never get your walk history, your list of saved places, your dog profiles, or each other. If a walk stops at a saved place, the message sent when it ends tells the people following it the place's name. Your lookout list is visible only to you, and household membership does not grant it. You can remove anyone from the People tab without asking them, and the walker is the only person who ever knows who is watching a walk.

Free

Walka Talka is free. There is no subscription, no in-app purchase, no advertising SDK and no third-party tracker. The Privacy Policy is the long version of all of this, including what deletion does and does not remove.

Where to get it

Walka Talka is an iPhone app. Get it from the App Store.

Contact

Email walkatalka@wickdsmart.com. If you are reporting a bug, include your device model and the app version from Settings, in About. The support page covers the questions that come up most.