Endurance sport, built in Europe
Follow every runner. Without a single radar.
Watching a field move across a course has always been a hardware problem: transponders, readers planted every couple of kilometres, cable and crew. Waypath needs a link.
Free on iPhone. Spectators open the link in any browser — no app, no account, nothing to install. It is a spectator view, not a timing system. See how live sharing works.
- Position held back 250 m
- The finish is never broadcast
- No account for spectators
Live on the course
A link, instead of a radar every 2 km
Seeing where athletes are during a race usually means renting tracking hardware: a transponder on every competitor, readers installed along the route, people to put them out and take them down, and a bill that grows with the length of the course, which is why following a whole field has mostly belonged to the biggest races.
Waypath moves that job onto the phone the runner is already carrying. The organiser draws the course. Runners who choose to appear on it show up as dots moving along it. Anyone holding the spectator link watches from a browser, on a phone at the roadside, or on a laptop at home.
Live sharing is free in Waypath, and there is nothing to rent, install, or collect afterwards.
Readers on the course
- A transponder issued to every athlete
- Readers installed every kilometre or two
- Power, cabling and crew on the course
- Cost rises with the route and the field
- A position only where a reader is standing
Waypath
- The organiser draws the course in the app
- Runners opt in from their own phone
- Spectators open a link in any browser
- No app and no account to follow along
- Positions refresh about twice a minute
It will tell you your runner is on the climb at 14 km. It will not tell you who won.
What this is, and what it is not
- The dot trails the runner by about 250 m. A position is not broadcast until the athlete is 250 metres past it. That delay is deliberate, it is what stops a shared link revealing where somebody set off from, and it means the map is always a little behind the real world.
- The finish is never broadcast. When a session ends, the positions still being held back are discarded rather than released. A live link never shows anyone crossing the line.
- It is not timing, and it does not replace it. Waypath has no finish times, no rankings and no results. If your event needs official times, it still needs chip timing. This is for the person on the roadside who wants to know whether to start walking to the 30 km mark.
- Nobody appears by accident. The organiser switches tracking on for the event, and each runner separately puts their own live run on the course. Either one off means no dot, for everybody, immediately. Being registered for an event never shares where you are.
- Narrowing the audience revokes the link. Anyone still holding it stops seeing the race, straight away.
Community
Clubs, group runs, and challenges worth turning up for
Sport in Europe is organised around clubs and a standing weekly session. Waypath is built for that rather than for a global follower count.
Start a club
A name, a sport, a picture and the people in it. Open to anyone on Waypath, limited to friends, or invite-only behind an eight-character code.
Put an event on the calendar
A date, a place, a sport and a meeting point, one-off or repeating weekly. Members see who is coming.
Run a challenge
“100 km in July.” “Everest by August.” Progress counts automatically from members’ matching activities, and the leaderboard updates itself.
Where the line is
A challenge leaderboard is built from what each member’s own device reports, and the server cannot audit it. It is the right tool for a club’s summer distance contest and the wrong one for a ranked competition, so Waypath calls it a challenge, not a result. Group chat inside a club is end-to-end encrypted; the club’s own name, place and date are not, because people have to be able to find it.
Somewhere to go
Trails, and what they are like right now
A catalogue of waymarked paths, rebuilt every month from OpenStreetMap, with the part a map cannot tell you added by the people who were just there.
Browse by region
Seventy-five regions, each described by its terrain, its season, and what it is known for.
Conditions, dated
Dry, muddy, icy, snow, overgrown, flooded or closed, reported by whoever walked it, with the day they saw it.
Comments and photographs
Pictures are resized and stripped of their metadata, including location, before they are uploaded.
Training
Know what the hills cost you
Most trackers hand you a time. Waypath explains it, and says plainly when a number is modelled rather than measured.
Grade-adjusted pace
The published Minetti cost-of-running curve shows what a pace was worth on the hills you actually climbed.
A pacer that slows on the climbs
Follow a route and the pacer budgets effort rather than distance, spending less of the clock on the steep kilometres, on your phone, your Watch, the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island.
Race predictions
Projected 5K, 10K, half and marathon times, taken from the fastest efforts inside your real runs, each with its own confidence.
Apple Watch
Record from the wrist with real heart rate, with or without your phone, and the exact sport comes home intact.
Load and readiness
Training load from sessions with a real heart-rate sensor, and a readiness score from your sleep, resting rate and HRV. Waypath labels it modelled, not measured, because that is what it is.
Fifty-six sports
From trail runs to sea kayaking. Walking uses its own metabolic curve, not running’s. Where no honest model exists for a sport, Waypath declines to invent one.
Built in Europe
Built in Europe, and kept in Europe
Our ambition is to be the app European athletes and clubs reach for first, built here for the way sport is organised here. The standard we hold ourselves to starts with something plainer: where your data actually lives. The full case is on why Waypath.
One server, inside the EEA
The database and your uploaded images sit on a single dedicated machine in Lauterbourg, France, inside the EEA, rented from a hosting provider that acts as our processor. Your account, activities, photos and messages do not leave the EEA in the ordinary course of using Waypath.
Nothing to sell, nothing to track
No advertising, no analytics SDK, no data brokers, no tracking. The project contains no Firebase, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Sentry, Bugsnag, AppsFlyer, Adjust, Facebook or Google Analytics SDK. There is nobody else in the room.
Messages we cannot read
Direct messages and group chat are encrypted on your device. The server stores ciphertext and holds no key. Activities, photos and profiles are not end-to-end encrypted, and this page says so rather than blurring it.
A route that never starts at your door
A published route is trimmed by a random 200 to 600 metres at each end, so sharing an activity does not hand over the doorstep somebody set off from, or the one they finished at.
A time, not a timetable
Start times are stored bucketed to the hour rather than to the minute, so a public activity cannot be read back as a daily routine. Contact matching stays off until you switch it on, and identifiers are hashed on your device before they are sent.
Your rights, and a real delete
Access, correction, export, restriction, objection and withdrawal of consent, in full, under the GDPR. Deleting your account erases the files you uploaded with it, not just the rows that point at them.
Said plainly
Encryption covers direct messages and group chat. It does not cover activities, photos or profiles, and it does not hide the fact that two people exchanged a message and when, because delivering it requires knowing that. Waypath holds no security certification and claims none. The controller is Hugo Moriceau, an individual. The whole picture, with the reasoning, is on the European data protection page.
The small print, up front
What Waypath does not claim
The app badges every modelled number and refuses to guess the ones it cannot know. It would be strange for its website not to do the same.
- Live sharing is not a timing system. No finish times, no rankings, no results, and a position that is deliberately about 250 m behind the runner.
- Readiness is modelled, not measured, and it is not a health assessment. It is a product’s opinion about your sleep and HRV, not a clinical one.
- Heart-rate zones need a watch or a chest strap. Waypath will not model them from pace, and a ride recorded with no strap is reported as unscored rather than given a number.
- Encryption covers what you write, not who you wrote to. Message bodies and attachments are end-to-end encrypted. Sender, recipient and timestamp are not, and neither are a club’s or event’s own details. Messages are also tied to the device that received them, so reinstalling loses the history.
- Challenge leaderboards are self-reported and cannot be audited by the server.
- Two active clubs, two events and two challenges per person at a time. Waypath is not yet a platform for running a whole season of races.
- The free tier keeps one saved route, and its heat map goes back 30 days rather than over your whole history. Recording activities stays free and unlimited; a second saved route and the full map are what premium is for.
- The trail catalogue is walking infrastructure. Paths, footways, tracks and bridleways, no cycling or ski routes. Above 60°N there is no elevation data, so those trails arrive without a climb profile.
Guides and comparisons
Read before you choose a running app
Specific, dated, and honest about what Waypath does not do. Competitor details we could not confirm are marked not verified.
- Best running apps in 2026: eight compared on price, live tracking, offline maps, trails, Apple Watch, GPX and data location
- A running app without a subscription
- Choosing an Apple Watch running app
- Live tracking for runners, by a browser link
- A running app that works offline: what that really means
- A GDPR running app, in concrete terms
- Nike Run Club alternative
- Runna alternative
- AllTrails alternative for runners
- Strava alternative
Questions
Waypath, answered
Tap a question. More on the FAQ page.
What is Waypath?
Waypath is an endurance sport app for iPhone and Apple Watch. It records 70 sports with GPS, carries a catalogue of 426,029 waymarked trails across 37 countries, and lets people follow you along a course through a link that opens in any browser.
Is Waypath free?
Yes. Recording is free and unlimited, and so are live sharing, clubs, events, challenges, the trail catalogue and the 3D fly-through. A premium subscription adds the analysis: every chart, race predictions, the full heat map and unlimited saved routes.
Does Waypath work offline?
Recording does. GPS is a satellite signal, so distance, pace and elevation are computed on the phone with no network at all. The basemap, live sharing and the trail catalogue need a connection, and Waypath does not offer downloadable offline map regions.
Can I import GPX files?
Not yet. Every activity exports as a GPX 1.1 file, and past workouts can be imported from Apple Health, but Waypath does not currently read a GPX file you hand it. It is a known gap and it is on the roadmap.
How does live tracking work?
The organiser draws the course and switches tracking on for the event. Each runner separately puts their own live run on it. Spectators open the link in a browser and watch the field move along the route, refreshing about twice a minute.
Do spectators need the app?
No. A browser and the link, nothing else. No app to install, no account to create, and it works on any operating system.
Is my location private?
Activities stay on your phone until you publish one, and you pick the audience each time. A published route loses any declared privacy zone and a random 200 to 600 metres from each end. A live position is held back until you are 250 metres past it, and the finish is never broadcast.
Does Waypath work with Apple Watch?
Yes. The Watch app records from the wrist with a real heart-rate reading, with or without the iPhone, and the exact sport comes home intact.
How is Waypath different from Strava?
Strava is much larger and has the segment network and the people in it. Waypath is iPhone and Apple Watch only, and is built around a spectator link anyone can open, a trail catalogue from OpenStreetMap, and a default in which nothing leaves your phone until you publish it.
Share the link. Let them watch.
Waypath records unlimited activities for free, forever. Live sharing, clubs, trails and the 3D fly-through are part of that.
Requires iPhone. Premium adds the analysis on top, every split and climb, race predictions, the training dashboard and unlimited saved routes.