Runflake running app, and what it records

Runflake records a run from the phone's own sensors. It speaks your numbers at each kilometre or mile, and it can follow a curated city route while calling the corners.

What Runflake is

A recorder first.

Distance, pace, splits, cadence, elevation and the route line all come from the phone in your pocket, and a voice coach and a course mode sit on top of that, both optional. The weekly plan is a calculation from the goal you set, not a model that rewrites itself around missed runs.

What it records without a watch

Outdoors the app asks the phone for a location roughly once per second, with batching and deferral turned off. Every point is written to the phone's database the moment it arrives, one all or nothing transaction per batch, and there is no save timer and no save at the end step, so a crash costs only what the operating system had not yet handed over. Why running apps lose runs covers that failure mode.

Indoor mode is a separate path that never turns GPS on, and distance there is your step count multiplied by an estimated stride length, and every indoor run carries an Estimated marker. The stride is a formula, a base length plus a term for cadence, scaled against a 170 cm reference height, and if the app has never been told your height it uses 170 cm.

There is no screen for correcting the estimate against what a treadmill shows.

What it says out loud

Every word the coach can say is a fixed string in the app's source. There is no generated wording, no model and no network request in the speaking path. Numbers come from a recorded pack covering zero to fifty-nine, and any announcement holding sixty or more is read entirely by the phone's own voice, so the voice never changes mid sentence.

The order never varies: distance, then time, then average pace. Zero components are skipped, so a fifteen minute split is read as Time fifteen minutes, and turn instructions are the exception to the recorded pack: they are always read by the phone's built-in voice, because the guidance distances fall outside the recorded number range.

Each category of cue has its own switch, and the chattier Pacer mode is off unless you turn it on. The announcement interval cannot be changed. On the settings screen it shows as a fixed value, and the screen does not pretend it is a choice. What running apps say out loud is the wider argument.

A cue that has waited more than twelve seconds is dropped rather than read late.

Curated city routes and spoken corners

There are 18 curated routes across 12 cities. The shortest is Gyeongui Line Forest Park in Seoul at 1.96 km, the longest the Richmond Park Tamsin Trail in London at 11.57 km. Surface is recorded as either paved or mixed, and nothing finer.

Turns are computed from each route's own shape before publication, not written by hand and not taken from a navigation provider. That yields 117 stored turns; two routes have none, and the app says so instead of staying silent. Each corner is announced at most twice, at 120 m out and again 25 m before, with spoken distances rounded down so you never hear an odd number, and the next turn appears on screen from 400 m. Six phrases cover every corner: bear left, bear right, turn left, turn right, keep straight, make a U-turn.

Off route detection is slow to fire on purpose. The corridor is 2.5 times the phone's own reported accuracy, floored at 45 m, and the app waits twelve continuous seconds outside it, or 40 m of route progress while outside, before saying anything. The code calls that floor provisional. It was chosen in simulation. If the signal drops the app stops judging the course. It does not declare you off it. This is not navigation in the sense a maps app means: no rerouting, and nothing that points you back to the line. Run a route in reverse and the turn cues switch off. They are not mirrored. The shapes come from OpenStreetMap, credited to OpenStreetMap contributors under the ODbL licence, and the OpenStreetMap copyright page, checked on 2 August 2026, requires both that credit and a statement that the data is available under the Open Database License.

What it costs today

Runflake is free at launch. If paid features are introduced later, the price and terms are stated before anyone is charged.

There is no paid tier today.

Every feature is available today. While payments are switched off, the server feature check returns true for every feature and every user, and there is no in-app purchase or subscription SDK in the app. That is a statement about the present, not a promise. How free running apps make money covers what usually funds a free app.

What leaves your phone

No account is needed to record. Signed out, your runs stay on the phone, the sync engine stops before transmitting anything when nobody is signed in, and nothing is backed up anywhere.

That is not the same as the device going quiet.

• Usage telemetry goes to the app's own database table under a random device-scoped id, with coordinates and heart-rate keys stripped first.
• Drawing the map sends viewport tile coordinates and your IP to an outside map host with no account identifier attached. It is the one exit to a third party with no consent gate.
• Signed in with location consent on, an outdoor run's GPS track and a simplified route line are uploaded, and heart rate stays in a local-only table.
• Heart rate is not part of that upload.

Withdraw location consent and the app blocks outdoor uploads on the phone side, in two independent places. There are no advertising SDKs, no third-party analytics and no third-party crash reporting in the app. The tracking domains list is empty. Only two outside parties can receive anything: the map tile host, and the identity provider you pick if you sign in. The privacy policy is the longer version.

Two leaderboards, and what is excluded from them

Total distance, and fastest single 1 km lap. There are exactly two ranking boards. Nothing else is ranked. Boards come in three scopes, your country, global, and individual routes, and the country board opens first, with global as the fallback when your country is unknown; your country comes from the phone's region setting, not from where you ran. Periods run weekly, monthly and yearly.

What is kept off a board matters more. Only outdoor runs with an uploaded GPS track count.

• Indoor and treadmill runs.
• Runs flagged as using a mock location provider. One flagged reading excludes the whole run, and a database trigger forces the flag back on if a client clears it.
• Impossible numbers, rejected by thresholds derived from world records: an average faster than 2:50 per kilometre, a lap faster than 2:30 per kilometre, a run longer than 300 km.
• Heart rate, barred by written rule from every judgement axis including goals, XP and course completion, because including it would favour whoever owns a watch.

A row can carry rank, name, avatar, the value, the number of runs, and for fastest 1 km a calendar date. It never shows where or when anyone ran. A board shows at most 100 runners, and you need an account to see one.

Watch apps, and why a watch is optional

The watch stays optional by design. A Wear OS build and an Apple Watch build exist and are intended for the first release, and the Wear OS build was verified on a Wear OS 5 emulator with a signed release APK.

Everything on the run screen comes from the phone. Nothing there waits for a wrist. The phone has no heart-rate sensor. A run with no heart-rate samples is normal, not broken. What a watch adds is heart rate, which is display only and excluded from rankings, goals, XP and course completion, so owning one confers no advantage. A run recorded on the watch is not lost if the phone was not listening at the time: the receiver stays open even when no run is in progress. Running with only your phone covers that trade.

Where it is available

Runflake is built and is not yet published to the App Store or Google Play, so there is no download available today. There is no store listing, no beta link and no install path.

Two questions separate a running app that will hold on to a run from one that will not: what it writes to disk while you are running, and what it offers when you reopen it after a crash. Both can be answered on the app you already have, by force quitting it mid run.