Alternatives
Looking for a Runify alternative
You arrived here searching for something to replace an app, which means you already know what you did not like about the last one. What follows is not a takedown of anybody. It is the six questions we think are worth putting to any running app, and Waypath's answers to all six, in the order they usually matter.
Before anything else
We are not going to describe somebody else's app
We have not audited Runify, and writing a confident paragraph about a product we have not tested is exactly the sort of thing this site exists not to do. Whatever it does today is on their own listing, and that is the version that will still be right next month.
What we can do is answer honestly for ourselves, in enough detail that you could catch us out. Take the same six questions to whichever app you are comparing us with. If a page cannot answer them without marketing language, that is itself an answer.
The six
Six questions, and our answers
| The question | Waypath's answer |
|---|---|
| Where does my data physically live? | On one machine in Lauterbourg, France, inside the EEA, rented from a hosting provider. Your account, activities, photos and messages do not leave the EEA in the ordinary course of using Waypath. |
| Who is paying for the free tier? | Subscribers. There is no advertising, no analytics SDK and no data broker in the app: no Firebase, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Sentry, Bugsnag, AppsFlyer, Adjust, Facebook or Google Analytics. Recording stays free and unlimited. |
| Can somebody find out where I live? | A published route loses any declared privacy zone and a random 200 to 600 metres from each end. Start times are stored bucketed to the hour. A live position is held back until you are 250 metres past it, and the finish is never broadcast. |
| Can I get my data back out? | Every activity exports as a GPX 1.1 file, with no subscription in the way. Deleting your account erases the files you uploaded with it, not only the rows pointing at them. |
| Which numbers are measured, and which are guessed? | Modelled figures are badged as modelled. Heart-rate zones need a real sensor and are never inferred from pace. Race predictions carry a confidence. Where no honest model exists for a sport, Waypath prints nothing. |
| What does it refuse to do? | No Android app today, no web app for recording, no GPX file import, no downloadable offline map regions, and no guided training plans. Those are listed further down rather than buried. |
Written on 12 August 2026 and correct to the best of our knowledge on that day. Every row above describes Waypath and no other product; apps change often, and the fairest thing this page can do is tell you to check theirs. Waypath is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any company named here, and all trademarks belong to their owners.
What it actually is
Waypath in three parts
A link instead of a radar
Watching a field move across a course has always meant renting hardware. Waypath moves the job onto the phone the runner already carries: the organiser draws the course, runners opt in individually, and spectators open a link in any browser with no app and no account. It is a spectator view, not a timing system, and it is free.
Somewhere to go on Sunday
426,029 waymarked trails across 37 countries and 75 curated regions, rebuilt monthly from OpenStreetMap, with dated condition reports from people who actually walked them: dry, muddy, icy, snow, overgrown, flooded or closed.
An explanation, not just a time
Grade-adjusted pace from the published Minetti curve, splits and climbs, race predictions with their own confidence, and 56 sports, each on a model that suits it. Walking uses its own metabolic curve rather than running's.
The one worth explaining
A community heat map with a floor under it
Your own heat map is drawn on your phone from your own activities and uploaded nowhere. On top of it sits an opt-in community layer, and looking at it is a separate switch from contributing to it.
A contributing activity sends which roughly 75-metre squares it crossed and in which week, as whole numbers: no coordinates, no time of day, no account, and the first and last 300 metres dropped. The label attached rotates every Monday, so two weeks cannot be tied back to one person, and a path is only drawn once at least three different people crossed it in the same week. Below three, nothing appears at all, which is what stops one person's route from being the thing on screen. Contributions are deleted automatically within 26 weeks.
The honest cost is on the heat maps page: because a contribution carries no identifier, we cannot go back and find yours to remove it. Switching contribution off stops anything further being sent, and that is the whole of what it can do.
The limits, unburied
Reasons Waypath might not be your answer
- iPhone and Apple Watch only. An Android app is planned for January 2027, which is a plan and not a promise. Spectators need no app at all, so they can already be on anything with a browser.
- No GPX file import. Past workouts come in from Apple Health; a downloaded archive cannot be loaded in yet.
- The envelope is not encrypted. Message bodies and attachments are; who sent what to whom, and when, is not, because delivery requires it. Clubs and events have to be findable, so their name, place and date are stored in the clear, as are activities, photos and profiles.
- Challenge leaderboards are self-reported and cannot be audited by the server. Right for a club's summer distance contest, wrong for a ranked competition.
- The trail catalogue is walking infrastructure. Paths, footways, tracks and bridleways, with no cycling or ski routes. Above 60°N there is no elevation data, so those trails arrive without a climb profile.
- Waypath holds no security certification and claims none. The controller is Hugo Moriceau, an individual, and the whole arrangement is set out on the European data protection page.
Ask us the six questions again in a year.
The answers are meant to survive being checked. Recording is free and unlimited, and every activity leaves as a GPX file.
Requires iPhone. There is no Android app today; one is planned for January 2027.