Fogbreaker
Almost nobody searches for a Fog of World review out of curiosity. They search for it because the app costs thirty dollars, there is no free tier and no trial, and thirty dollars is enough money that you want someone to tell you first.
So this is that. What it costs, what it actually does in 2026, what it is genuinely the best tool for, and the specific kind of person who should not buy it.
One disclosure before any of it: we make Fogbreaker, which clears fog off a map as you walk and therefore competes with Fog of World in the broad sense. We think Fog of World is a good app and this review says so. We also think a lot of people buy it for the wrong reason, which is the more useful half of the article, and the reason we would rather write this than let the question sit unanswered.
What $30 actually buys
Checked on 3 September 2026, because everything in this section moves.
Fog of World is made by Ollix and has existed since 2012, which makes it the original of the genre by roughly a decade. It is $30.00 on the App Store and $29.99 on Google Play, as a one-time purchase. There is no subscription and there are no in-app purchases, which in 2026 is close to extinct. The Google Play listing carries a 30-day money-back guarantee; the App Store does not.
The current iOS release is version 3.7.4, updated in May 2026, holding 4.8 stars across about 3,000 ratings, and it needs iOS 13.0 or later. If you read somewhere that the app has gone quiet, that was true for a stretch and is not true now. We had that wrong on another page on this site until this week, so we are not pointing fingers.
The feature list, as the store describes it:
- Background recording, so it maps you without being opened
- Statistics by world, continent, country and territory, plus a passport card and Territory Rankings showing your exploration ratio per territory
- Achievement badges
- A track editor that lets you erase bad points caused by GPS drift and add routes it missed
- GPX and KML import
- Multiple separate databases, with snapshots
- Cloud sync through iCloud, Dropbox or OneDrive
- Offline reverse geocoding
- Siri shortcuts
- Both WGS-84 and China's GCJ-02 coordinate systems
- 13 languages
The two things nothing free does as well
Most of that list is table stakes. Two items are not, and they are most of what you are paying for.
Sync runs through your own cloud storage. Not Ollix's servers. Your location history, which is the single most sensitive category of data a phone holds, lands in an iCloud, Dropbox or OneDrive account you already control. There is no account to create with Ollix and no company sitting on a copy. For an app whose entire job is recording everywhere you have physically been, that is a genuinely principled structure, and it is the reason a lot of long-time users will not move.
The track editor. Every app in this category eventually clears fog you did not earn, because GPS drifts, planes exist, and a bad fix in a tunnel can wipe out a neighbourhood you were saving. Fog of World lets you go in and delete those points, and add the trips it missed. If your map is a ten-year record you care about, the ability to repair it matters more than any feature on the marketing page. Almost nothing else in the category offers it.
Add GPX import, and it becomes the only realistic option for someone who has years of tracks sitting in another app and wants them on one map.
The question that decides whether you should buy it
Are you mapping the world, or your neighbourhood?
This is the whole review. Fog of World is a travel app. Its statistics are organised by world, continent, country and territory. Its best moments are the ones where a flight carves a bright line across a country you had never been to, and a passport card that fills in as you travel. At that scale it is excellent and nothing has displaced it in fourteen years.
What it is not built for is watching your own city fill in street by street on foot. Those are different resolutions of the same idea, and an app tuned for one feels wrong for the other. The tile size that makes a transatlantic flight look like an achievement makes a walk around your block look like a rounding error.
Nearly every disappointed review of this app is someone who bought a world-scale tool to solve a neighbourhood-scale problem. It is not a flaw in the app. It is a mismatch, and it costs thirty dollars to discover.
The honest downsides
- No trial, and thirty dollars is a real barrier for something you cannot test first. On Android the money-back guarantee softens this. On iOS you are committing blind.
- The cloud setup is fiddlier than a login. The thing that makes it private also makes it the most annoying part of onboarding, and cross-platform or multi-device sync is where most of the support questions live.
- It is a record, not a motivator. There are badges and territory rankings, so calling it purely a logbook would be unfair. But there is no streak asking you to go out today, no friends, no reason to walk a street you have not walked. It records ambition; it does not create it.
- It counts however you travelled. Flights and drives clear enormous amounts of map. If your instinct is that the map should reflect where you have actually been, on your feet, that is a design disagreement and not a bug.
Buy it if
- You travel internationally and want a lifetime map of it. This is the reason the app exists and it is still the best at it.
- You want your location history in your own cloud rather than a company's.
- You have years of GPX tracks to import, or a map you will want to repair.
- You prefer paying once to renting software forever.
Do not buy it if
- You want your own city to fill in as you walk. Wrong resolution. This is the most common mistake and the expensive one.
- You want something to make you walk more. Badges and rankings are not the same as a streak, a level or a friend one street ahead of you.
- You want to try the idea before paying. Free options now exist that did not in 2012, and the honest advice is to test the concept on one of them first. We listed them in Fog of World alternatives, which covers Fog Map, FogWalker, Walksy, FOWIRL, MysteryHike and Google Maps Timeline, with what each one costs.
That last group is the one we built for, so here is the disclosure in full. Fogbreaker is free on iOS and Android, with optional in-app purchases that are never required. Your city starts hidden, GPS movement outdoors is the only thing that clears it, and the fog is tuned so a walk around your neighbourhood is a visible event. On top sit XP, levels, daily streaks and a friend leaderboard, which is the part Fog of World deliberately does not do. We are not a travel app, we do not do country counts or continent statistics, and if that is what you came for then Fog of World is the better purchase and we will not pretend otherwise. On data: we are Teratis Solutions GmbH, a German company, your data sits on EU servers under GDPR, we do not sell it or share it for advertising, and you can delete your account and everything in it yourself.
If you want the concept explained rather than shopped, that is fog of war for real life.
The verdict
Worth $30 if you fly. Hard to justify if you walk.
Fog of World is a well-made, unusually principled app that has outlasted almost everything released alongside it, and the people who love it have loved it for a decade. Nothing about the price is unreasonable for what it does.
But it does one specific thing, and the search traffic that reaches this page is mostly people who want the other thing. If the map you are imagining is countries, buy it. If the map you are imagining is your own streets, spend nothing, try a free one, and see whether the idea holds you before anyone gets thirty dollars.
One last practical note that applies whichever you choose: apps in this category are only as good as how consistently they run in the background. An app that records everything and one you remember to open twice a week produce very different maps of the same life. Check how your phone treats it before you judge the app.
