Before Google released the Recording API, that’s what we used. But it was a huge time sink - with the amount of Android devices and operating systems, there were a ton of device specific issues which were impossible for me to reproduce without buying the models that had these, and we don’t have budget for such.

Pixel devices tended to have battery consumption issues with it, and Chinede devices with battery optimization were killing it very often etc.

If you find some way, I would love to hear about it. In the future we’ll be adding in smart watch support, which could help you to count the steps if you have one.

Edit: also one thing to try out if possible is to remove battery optimization from Google Play Services. Your device might be killing that, which stops counting the steps.

Yeah - battery optimization has tendency to kill apps, even if they’re not consuming resources. If you’re experiencing battery drain from doing this (or if it works fine), I’d appreciate if you send me your findings to our contact email address ❤️

The game doesn’t need to be active on regular Android and counts steps when killed. I’m pretty sure the reason why it’s like that on GrapheneOS is that when the game is killed, the sandbox is killed and the Google Play Services shut down. If Google Play Services aren’t on there, the Recording API will not count steps in the background.

Probably easiest solution is to let WalkScape to run in the background, when it’s freezed the battery consumption should be basically nothing.

I haven’t used GrapheneOS myself, but I’ve heard from others that running it in sandbox works. The game requires Google Play Services in order to count the steps in background, so sandbox with Google Play Services should fix that. The API the game specifically uses is the Recording API.

This is planned as part of the QoL updates! Notifications that are opt-in for certain things happening in the game.

And thank you! I know it’s hard to also trust game devs these days, but we’re doing all we can to protect our users privacy. That’s why there are already privacy settings in the game too - you can hide your steps from other players if you don’t want to share those. And you can also hide your entire user profile so it’s not visible to other players. These settings also protect you if 3rd parties scrape the leaderboards etc.

We have lootboxes that are (and always will be) obtainable through gameplay. You can get chests from any activity while you’re playing the game. Same applies for cosmetics, which are also something you obtain through gameplay.

The very first devblog I wrote I already promised that we will never do predatory monetisation. Affordable subscription should be all we need to keep the game running. And no ads either!

It’s just steps and the timestamp, no location data. We don’t ask for location permission, and it’s not accessible through OS APIs either.

Thank you so much ❤️

We do have the privacy policy on there, which lists what sensitive information we collect. It’s a bit vague, and we could later on edit it to be more specific, but I don’t have the required skills to edit those kinda texts and we can’t afford a lawyer at the moment. The sensitive information we collect are your email, username and step data, and the step data includes device information (phone model & operating system).

Non-sensitive information includes all kinds of gameplay data, like items you got and how many things you’ve crafted etc. which we use for game balancing and when designing new content.

Thank you! Definitely our plan to get these documents through a lawyer when we can afford one. One of the surprises to me has been how many things there are these days that indie devs like myself need to deal with that are completely non-related (legal especially), and how expensive those can be. As we want to stay independent, we don’t have legal help from publishers, stakeholders etc. to deal with such.

Well that’s definitely weird - Android or iOS? We’ll need to try this ourselves to see if there’s something going on with that form.

Thanks for the report and happy walking! ❤️

When it comes to tracking, smart watch support is the most frequently asked addition and biking is the second. We will definitely add biking after smart watch support, as long as we find a viable way to do that. Biking relies quite heavily on GPS data which we don’t want to deal with, so we would likely be using Apple Health and on Android some specific apps to pull that data from.

If you apply, make sure to mention that! Would appreciate hearing if it works or not.

Thank you so much! ❤️

For the online version it’ll be affordable subscription. For single player a one time purchase.

Yup, mention of GPS is a holdover as I’ve used some privacy policy templates to create the policy. Legal writing isn’t really something I’ve done as an indie game dev before :D

The game doesn’t use location permission and doesn’t ask for it, and it will never require GPS data. We have that clause because we might at some point want to do rough location estimates using IP addresses, for instance to see how many players we have from specific countries.

I suck at writing legal stuff and English isn’t my native language, so I wrote the policy using different templates. We should probably remove the mention of GPS entirely as it’s quite misleading.

Thank you, and happy walking! ❤️

Running counts! Also treadmills or walking pads, as long as you have your phone in your pocket.

Smart watches are not supported yet, but coming. Smart watch support would already work great on iOS, but we’re held up by Google with it as they introduced Health Connect for smart watch integrations and it’s a buggy mess at the moment. Google Fit APIs (that would’ve worked nicely) are deprecated.