Built in Europe
Why Waypath: a running app built in Europe
Our ambition is to build the app European athletes and clubs reach for first, and the best one they can find anywhere. That is an ambition, not a scoreboard we have already won. What this page can do is set out exactly what “built in Europe” means here, item by item, in a form you can check.
The honest framing
Nobody can hand you the best running app in Europe
There is no objective title here, and a page that awards itself one is telling you about its marketing rather than its product. So this one does the opposite. Every claim below is a fact about where a machine sits, what a piece of code does, or a number the database can produce, and each is stated precisely enough that you could catch us being wrong.
Waypath is built by one independent developer in Europe, with no venture funding, no growth team and no advertising business behind it. That is the reason the app is a free tier with a subscription on top instead of an audience being sold to somebody, and it is also the reason it is smaller and younger than the apps it gets compared with. Both halves of that come from the same fact.
The plainest question
Where your data actually is
Most apps answer this with the word “cloud”. Here is the address.
The database and your uploaded images sit on a single machine in Lauterbourg, France, rented from a hosting provider. Your account, activities, photos and messages do not leave the EEA in the ordinary course of using Waypath. There is no second continent involved and no chain of processors to trace, because there is one server and one developer.
The difference that matters
Privacy designed in, not bolted on afterwards
The GDPR can be met by writing a policy about what you already collect. It can also be met by not collecting it. These are the places where Waypath took the second route, and each one costs the app a feature it could otherwise have had.
A route that never starts at your door
Publishing an activity removes any declared privacy zone and trims a random 200 to 600 metres from each end. Random, so the length of the missing piece tells nobody anything, and at both ends, because a finish is a doorstep too.
A time, not a timetable
Start times are stored bucketed to the hour rather than to the minute, so a public history cannot be read back as “out of the house at 06:40 every Tuesday”. The cost is that Waypath cannot show you a precise public start time, and that is the right trade.
Messages we cannot read
Direct and group messages are encrypted on your device. The server stores ciphertext and holds no key, and attachments are refused unless they arrive encrypted. The cost is that reinstalling loses the history, because the keys are tied to the device.
Nothing to sell, nobody to sell it to
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. This website matches the app: no third-party scripts, no external fonts, no analytics.
Photographs without their metadata
Pictures are resized and stripped of their metadata, including location, before they are uploaded. Contact matching stays off until you switch it on, and the identifiers are hashed on your device before they are sent.
Your rights, and a delete that deletes
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 only the rows that point at them.
The thing we refuse to charge for
A spectator needs a browser and a link
Watching a field move across a course has always been a hardware problem: a transponder on every athlete, readers planted every kilometre or two, cable, crew, and a bill that grows with the route. That is why following a whole field has mostly belonged to the biggest races, and why a club race on a Sunday has never had it.
Waypath moves that job onto the phone the runner is already carrying. The organiser draws the course, runners opt in one by one from their own phones, and anyone holding the link watches in a browser. No app to install, no account to create, nothing to rent and nothing to collect afterwards. It works on any operating system, because it is a web page.
Live sharing is free, and it stays free. It is the feature most obviously worth charging for, and charging for it would defeat the point: a spectator link that costs money is a spectator link most clubs will not use.
A spectator needs a browser and a link. That is the whole list.
What it is, and what it is not
- 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, immediately.
- The dot trails the runner by about 250 m, deliberately, which is what stops a shared link from revealing where somebody set off from. The finish is never broadcast: the positions still being held back at the end are discarded rather than released.
- It is not timing and does not replace it. No finish times, no rankings, no results. An event that needs official times still needs chip timing.
Built for here
The way sport is organised in Europe
Endurance sport here runs on clubs, a standing weekly session and races that go up. An app built around a global follower count is built for a different shape of week.
Clubs, not followers
A club has a name, a sport, a picture and the people in it, open to anyone, limited to friends, or invite-only behind an eight-character code. Events go on a calendar with a meeting point, one-off or repeating weekly, and members can see who is coming.
Races that go up
Grade-adjusted pace comes from the published Minetti cost-of-running curve, so a kilometre with 90 metres of climb in it stops looking like a bad one, and the pacer budgets effort rather than distance on a climb.
Trails in 37 countries
Rebuilt every month from OpenStreetMap, described by terrain and season, and carrying dated condition reports from the people who last walked them.
Metric, and in your language
Localised into 34 languages, with a French version of this site alongside the English one, and 56 sports covered, from trail runs to sea kayaking.
A heat map with a floor under it
Your own heat map never leaves your phone. The community layer is opt-in, sends only which roughly 75-metre squares were crossed in which week, and only draws a path once at least three different people crossed it in the same week.
One inbox, one person
Bug reports, factual corrections to this site and club questions all arrive in the same place, and the person who reads it is the person who writes the app.
The small print, up front
What Waypath does not claim
A page arguing that an app is trustworthy has to be the page that lists its gaps, or it is arguing the opposite of what it says.
- End-to-end encryption stops at the envelope. The body of a message and its attachments are encrypted; the fact that two people exchanged one, and when, is not, because delivering it requires knowing that. A club or event has to be findable, so its name, place and date are stored in the clear, and so are activities, photos and profiles.
- Waypath holds no security certification and claims none. The controller is Hugo Moriceau, an individual.
- Readiness is a product's opinion, not a clinical one. The app badges it modelled, not measured, and it is not a health assessment. Zones require an actual sensor on your body; a session that had none comes back unscored instead of decorated with a number nobody measured.
- A challenge is not a result. Its leaderboard is assembled from what each member's own device reports and the server has no way to audit it, which is why the app calls it a challenge. Organisers also hit a ceiling: two active clubs, two events and two challenges each, at a time.
- iPhone and Apple Watch only, today. No Android app, no web app for recording, and no GPX file import. Every activity does export as GPX 1.1.
- The catalogue is built from things people walk on. Footways, paths, tracks and bridleways only: cycle networks and ski routes are not in it. North of 60°N the elevation source runs out, so trails up there arrive with no climb profile attached.
What is planned
The answer to “iPhone only?”
It is the first objection this page meets, and the honest answer has two halves. The first is that spectators are already platform-agnostic: following a live link needs a browser and nothing else, so the people watching can be on Android, Windows, anything. Only the athlete recording the activity needs an iPhone.
The second is that an Android app is planned for January 2027. That is a plan and a date we are working towards, not a guarantee, and this page will say so until there is something to download. GPX file import is on the same roadmap without a date attached. If either one is what you are waiting for, wait — an app that is honest about its gaps should not talk you into buying a phone.
Keep reading
Related
Built here, kept here.
Unlimited recording, free. A live link that costs nothing and opens in any browser. One server, in France, inside the EEA.
Requires iPhone. There is no Android app today; one is planned for January 2027.