7 Apps Like Randonautica, and the Honest Problem With the Original (2026)

Randonautica sells one of the best ideas any app has ever had: press a button, get a coordinate, go there. No reviews, no top-ten list, no algorithm deciding what you would like. Just a point on the map and the question of what is actually there.

It is also built on a theory that its own documentation has described as "pseudo-scientific nonsense," and it once sent two teenagers to a bag containing human remains.

Both things are true, and that is why people go looking for alternatives. The itch Randonautica scratches is real and surprisingly hard to satisfy elsewhere. The packaging around it is a different matter.

Full disclosure before the list: we make one of these apps. Fogbreaker is ours, it is in here because it answers the same itch in a different way, and we will be specific about what it does not do.

What Randonautica actually is

Worth understanding before you pick a replacement, because the alternatives split along exactly these lines.

The app was released on 22 February 2020 by Randonauts LLC, founded by Auburn Salcedo and Joshua Lengfelder. It grew out of the Fatum Project, which built its first random place generator on 22 February 2018 and released a public Telegram bot that July for a research community of around seventy people. Lengfelder found it in a fringe science chat in January 2019 and turned it into an app.

Mechanically, it asks a quantum random number generator at the Australian National University in Canberra for numbers, scatters a few thousand points around your location, and looks for structure in the scatter. An attractor is where those points cluster most densely. A void is where they are sparsest. You get sent to the middle of one or the other.

The premise stacked on top of that is that setting an intention before you generate influences which point you get. This is where it falls apart. A physicist who has worked with quantum random number generators called the theory "completely absurd," with the summary: "There is no quantum physics here." The app's own documentation has conceded the mind-machine interaction claims.

Then July 2020 happened. It hit 10.8 million users, the hashtag passed 176 million views on TikTok, and in June 2020 users following coordinates to Duwamish Head in West Seattle found a bag containing the bodies of Jessica Lewis, 36, and Austin Wenner, 27. Their landlord was arrested that August and convicted of second-degree murder in 2022. That is a genuine tragedy that had nothing to do with the app, but it became the app's marketing whether anyone wanted it to or not. By August, TikTok videos were reading Randonautica results as evidence of a child trafficking ring near Seattle-Tacoma airport, drawing millions of views and real harassment of businesses that had nothing to do with anything.

Strip all of that away and you are left with something genuinely good: a mechanism that makes you go somewhere you would never have chosen. Guy Debord described the same instinct in 1956 as the dérive, and Randonautica cites him directly. The randomness does the one thing your own judgement cannot, which is to get out of your own way.

So the list below is grouped by which part of that you actually want.

If you want a random point to walk to

1. Dérive app

The intellectually honest version of Randonautica, and the one almost no alternatives list mentions. Built by architect Eduardo Cachuco and programmer Babak Fakhamzadeh, it gives you a deck of instruction cards rather than coordinates: "turn right at the next intersection," "follow something red," "pick up a piece of trash." Cards refresh every few minutes, which keeps you moving.

The difference matters. A coordinate tells you where to end up and leaves the walk itself as dead time. A card deck makes the walking the activity. It is also explicitly Situationist rather than pretending to be physics, which is refreshing.

Best for: people who liked the randomness and rolled their eyes at the quantum stuff. The trade-off: it is a small, art-project-scale app, not a polished product with a support team. Availability has been patchy over the years, so check it is still running on your platform before you plan an afternoon around it.

2. Randonautica itself, used differently

Not a joke entry. If you ignore the intention-setting, the coordinate generator still works fine as a random destination picker, and nothing else does it as smoothly. It runs on iOS and Android in twelve languages and was still being updated in June 2026.

The model is free with a daily token allowance, with a Pro subscription for unlimited generations, custom starting locations and a token booster add-on. Pricing shifts, so check the current numbers rather than trusting any list, including this one.

The trade-off: you have to actively ignore the framing, and the community around it will keep trying to sell you the framing.

If you want a reason to go somewhere specific

3. Adventure Lab

The most underrated app in this category. Made by Groundspeak, the geocaching company, it runs location-based story walks with over 50,000 public Adventures worldwide, and unlike traditional geocaching there is no physical container to find, so Adventures can be indoors and nothing gets muddy or goes missing. You walk to a location, the app unlocks a stage, you answer something, you move on.

Free account, no commitment, and if you already have a geocaching account the finds count toward your stats.

Best for: the Randonautica experience with an actual payoff at the destination. The trade-off: coverage is uneven. Dense in some cities, thin in others. Check your area before getting excited.

4. Geocaching

The original, running since 2000, with around 3.4 million active caches worldwide. This is the highest-density option by a distance: in most European and North American cities you are within a few hundred metres of a cache right now.

Best for: reliability. There is essentially always something near you. The trade-off: it is a find-the-tupperware game, and the destinations are chosen because they hide a container well, not because they are interesting. Many are lamp-post skirts in car parks. Also worth knowing that c:geo is a free open-source Android client for the same databases if you dislike the official app.

5. Munzee

QR-code and NFC based rather than physical containers, with daily progression mechanics and a large variety of tag types. Smaller community than geocaching, which cuts both ways: less coverage, but the players who are there are active.

Best for: people who found geocaching's pace too slow. The trade-off: in most cities the density is well below geocaching's, so it works best if your area happens to have an active local group.

6. Atlas Obscura

Not random at all, and that is the point. It is a curated database of genuinely strange places, plotted on a single map so you can find what is near you. The entries are editorially chosen and written up properly, so where Randonautica sends you to an empty verge with a mysterious atmosphere, Atlas Obscura sends you to something that is actually there.

Best for: when the random points keep landing on nothing and you want a hit rate. The trade-off: it is a guidebook. Someone else already decided this place was worth seeing, which is exactly the algorithm-curation problem people used Randonautica to escape.

7. iNaturalist

A sideways answer that works better than it sounds. Instead of a destination, it gives you a reason to look: photograph plants, animals and fungi, and the app identifies them and files the observation as real biodiversity data used by researchers.

Best for: turning an ordinary walk into an attention exercise, which is what most people are actually after. The trade-off: it will not send you anywhere. You supply the route; it supplies the noticing.

If you want the whole unexplored city as the target

Fogbreaker (ours)

Here is the honest positioning: we do not generate random coordinates. If a single mystery point is specifically what you want, one of the options above is a better fit and we would rather say so.

What we do instead is invert the problem. Your map starts completely hidden under fog, and walking is the only thing that clears it. So there is no single destination, there is a whole dark map, and every street you have never walked is a target. The reason people find this scratches the Randonautica itch is that it answers the same underlying question, "where have I not been," but with information instead of chance. A random coordinate has maybe a one-in-five shot at being somewhere interesting. Your own unexplored streets are, by definition, always somewhere you have not been.

On the data question, since it matters for an app that maps where you walk: Fogbreaker is built by Teratis Solutions GmbH, a German company. Your data sits on servers in the EU, it is GDPR compliant, we do not sell it or share it with third parties for advertising, and you can delete your account and everything in it yourself at any time.

Best for: people whose real complaint about Randonautica was that the destination was usually nothing. The trade-off: no mystery, no spooky element, no single point to aim at, and it is built around walking rather than driving to a coordinate. If the appeal was the ritual and the strangeness, this is a different thing and we will not pretend otherwise. Free on iOS and Android, with optional in-app purchases that are never required.

The short version

Two categories deliberately left out. Pokémon GO and Ingress are excellent for getting you walking but they overlay a game on the map rather than sending you somewhere new, and we covered them separately in games like Pokémon GO. Komoot and AllTrails plan good routes, which is the opposite of what you are asking for here.

The safety part, briefly

This genuinely matters with this category of app, more than with a step counter.

A generated coordinate does not know what is there. It can and does land on private property, active railway land, quarries, industrial sites and genuinely unsafe ground. Randonautica's own terms address trespassing for a reason, and Play Store reviews are full of people sent well off-trail into woodland to find nothing.

The rules are boring and worth following anyway: do not enter private property, treat any point you cannot reach on a public path as a point you skip rather than a challenge, tell someone where you are going, and go in daylight the first few times. If a location feels wrong when you arrive, the correct response is to leave, not to film it.

This is also the practical case for the alternatives above. A geocache, an Adventure Lab stage or an Atlas Obscura entry has been placed by a human who got there legally. A quantum coordinate has been placed by nothing at all.

When Randonautica is still the right answer

If what you want is the ritual, keep it. Setting an intention, generating a point and walking to it with a bit of narrative tension is a genuinely enjoyable way to spend an evening, and the fact that the mechanism is not what it claims does not stop it working on you. Plenty of useful things are placebo-shaped.

Switch if you got tired of arriving at a hedge. That is the single most common complaint, and every alternative here is a different answer to it: Adventure Lab and geocaching guarantee something is there, Atlas Obscura guarantees it is interesting, Dérive app makes the walk itself the point, and we make the unexplored part of your own map the target.

The underlying instinct is the good part, and it long predates the app. It is the same one behind walking without a destination and behind people who set out to walk every street in their city. You do not need a quantum laser in Canberra to tell you where you have not been. You just need something that keeps track.