Fogbreaker
Fog of World has been doing this since 2012, which in app terms is roughly forever. It is the original of the genre: the whole planet starts hidden under fog, you go places, the fog burns off behind you, and what is left is a map of your actual life.
People still go looking for alternatives to it, though, and the reasons are consistent. It is a paid app in a category where free options now exist. Its last release was in September 2024. And, most importantly, a lot of people discover after buying it that it was built for a slightly different purpose than the one they had in mind.
That last one is the whole article, so let us start there.
The question that decides everything
Are you mapping the world, or your neighbourhood?
Fog of World is a travel app. Its statistics are organised by world, continent, country and territory, and its satisfying moments are the ones where a trip carves a bright line across a country you had never been to. At that scale it is excellent and nothing has really displaced it.
What it is not built for is the other thing people want, which is watching your own city fill in street by street on foot. Those are different resolutions, and an app tuned for one feels wrong for the other. A tile size that makes a transatlantic flight look impressive makes a walk around your block look like almost nothing.
Most disappointment with this category traces back to buying a tool for the wrong scale. So sort yourself first, then read the list.
What Fog of World actually gives you
Credit where it is due, because the alternatives lists rarely bother.
Built by Ollix, on iOS and Android. It records in the background, shows everywhere you have been on one map, and breaks your coverage down by country and continent. Version 3.60 has sat at roughly 4.81 stars across about 2,500 reviews, which is an unusually high rating to hold for that long.
Its best design decision is one almost nobody copies: sync runs through your own cloud storage, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive, rather than through the developer's servers. Your location history stays in an account you already control. For an app that maps everywhere you have physically been, that is a genuinely thoughtful structure.
It is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription, which is increasingly rare and part of why people stay loyal to it. Published prices disagree with each other and have moved over the years, so check the store rather than trusting any list, this one included.
The honest downsides: the price is a real barrier for something you cannot try first, the September 2024 release date means it has been quiet for a while, and the cloud-sync setup is more fiddly than a normal account login.
The alternatives
A caveat worth stating plainly: this category has a long tail of small apps, several of them one-person projects, and their features and prices move around. Everything below is described at the level it can be described accurately. Check the store listing before you commit.
1. Fog Map
The closest thing to a straight free substitute. Same core loop, a dark map that clears where you go, built on OpenStreetMap data.
Best for: finding out whether you actually like this genre before paying for it. The trade-off: it is the plainest option here. You get the fog and not much else, no progression, no social layer, and a smaller team behind it.
2. FogWalker
Framed around steps and journeys rather than travel. The world starts fogged and lifts as you walk, which puts it closer to the everyday-movement end of the category than the international end.
Best for: people who want the fog concept applied to ordinary daily movement. The trade-off: a smaller and newer project than Fog of World, so expect less polish and a shorter track record.
3. Walksy
Explicitly a walking game rather than a travel log. It leans on the same mechanic, revealing your neighbourhood street by street as you walk, and treats the city as the playing field.
Best for: the local, on-foot version of the idea. The trade-off: if what you wanted was a record of the countries you have visited, this is aimed somewhere else entirely.
4. FOWIRL
Fog of war in real life, as the name suggests. Reveals only the places you have actually been, and is happy to count commutes and driving as well as walking.
Best for: people who want everything to count, including the car. The trade-off: counting driving is exactly what some people are trying to avoid, since it clears large amounts of map without you having really seen any of it.
5. Fogbreaker (ours)
The honest positioning: we are not a travel app. We do not do country counts, continent statistics, or the satisfying line across an ocean. If your goal is logging the world, Fog of World remains the better tool for that and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
We are built for the other resolution. Your city starts hidden, walking is the only thing that clears it, and the fog is tuned so that a walk around your own neighbourhood is a visible event rather than a rounding error. On top of the map sit XP, levels, daily streaks and a friend leaderboard, which is the part Fog of World deliberately does not have: it is a private record, we are a game.
If you want the underlying idea explained rather than compared, we wrote that up separately in fog of war for real life.
Best for: clearing your own city on foot, with progression and friends. The trade-off: we are newer, smaller, and no substitute for a global travel log. Free on iOS and Android, with optional in-app purchases that are never required.
On data, since it matters for this category more than most: 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.
6. Google Maps Timeline
Not a fog app, and worth considering anyway. If you have had Location History switched on, Google has quietly been building a map of everywhere you have gone for years, and you can look at it right now for free.
Best for: seeing your own history immediately, at zero cost and zero setup. The trade-off: there is no fog, no game, and no sense of what is left unexplored, which is the entire appeal of everything else on this page. It is a record, not a motivation. We compared it against the alternatives in how to see a map of everywhere you have walked.
Quick comparison
| App | Scale it suits | Game layer | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fog of World | World and countries | No | One-time purchase |
| Fog Map | Either | No | Free |
| FogWalker | Daily movement | Light | Check listing |
| Walksy | Neighbourhood | Yes | Check listing |
| FOWIRL | Everything, driving included | Light | Check listing |
| Fogbreaker | Your city, on foot | Yes, XP and streaks | Free |
| Google Timeline | Everywhere, passively | No | Free |
So which one
- You want a lifetime travel map and you fly a lot. Fog of World. It is still the best at the thing it was built for.
- You want to test the concept for free first. Fog Map.
- You want your own city to fill in as you walk it. Walksy or Fogbreaker.
- You want driving to count. FOWIRL.
- You just want to see where you have been and stop there. Google Maps Timeline, which you may already own.
One last thing worth saying, because it is the most common regret in this category: fog apps are only as good as how consistently they run. An app that records everything and one you remember to open twice a week produce very different maps of the same life. Whichever you pick, check how it behaves in the background on your phone before you judge the app itself.
