Walk: a step counter without the ads or the clutter

Custom platforms

Walk is an Android step counter I designed, built and published myself. It counts your steps, shows you today and the week behind it, and keeps all of it on your phone.

Plenty of step counters, and none I wanted to open

I was looking for a simple app to count my daily steps: a number for today, a goal, and a way to see whether this week was better than the last. The Play Store has plenty of step counters, and they tend to go wrong in one of two ways.

The free ones pay for themselves with ads — a banner under the count, a video between screens — so the one number you opened the app to see is competing for the space. The ones without ads have usually grown into fitness platforms, with an account to create, challenges, badges and an upgrade screen, and the count somewhere in the middle of it all.

Neither is a bug. Each is a business model showing through the interface, and a step counter is something you glance at several times a day, so you pay for that model on every glance. I wanted one that was free, carried no ads and put nothing on the screen that was not about your steps. I could not find it, so I built it.

One screen, read at a glance

Today's count sits inside a ring that fills as you close in on your goal. Tap the number to change the goal, anywhere from 100 to 100,000 steps.
An hourly chart of today, with the last seven days lined up behind it.
Seven accent colours, and a light and a dark theme.
No account, no ads, nothing to buy and nothing locked. A heart button opens a donation page for anyone who wants to chip in, and it is entirely optional.

Even the request for a review is kept out of the way: it only appears on a day you have just reached your goal, and only a handful of times.

A number you can trust with the app closed

A screen that simple only works if the number on it is right, and that is where most of the work went. Phones are built to put apps to sleep in the background, and a step counter that only counts while it is open is not much of a step counter.

It keeps counting with the app closed, after the phone restarts, and past midnight into the next day.
If counting was interrupted — by an app update, say — Walk leaves the gap rather than piling the missed steps into a single moment. A gap in the chart is honest; a burst of walking that never happened is not.
The notification Android requires from any app working in the background is set to the quietest level and only says "Counting your steps". Turning it off hides it without stopping the count.
Each permission the phone asks for comes with a short screen explaining what it is for, and the one the app can work without can be skipped.

No account, so your history travels by hand

Keeping your steps on the phone means there is no account and nothing is uploaded. It also means there is no cloud to restore from when you change phones, so Walk lets you carry your history yourself: export a backup to a folder you choose, import it on the new phone, and your steps, your goal and your colour all come with it.

Built for older phones too

Plenty of the phones people actually carry are several years old, and a lot of new apps no longer work properly on them. Walk runs on Android 8 and later, and it was built and tested against those older phones from the start rather than only against a new one.

Walk is free on Google Play.