WoofTrax: Dog walk for charity

I use this app a lot while walking the dogs at my local shelter, love doubling up my charity work and tracking how many dogs I’ve walked that day. But it’s very unpractical for on longer walks. If you want to get the full charity points for your walk you have to remember to reset it every time you go a quarter mile. I one mile walk will only give you 10 charity points unless you manually break it up as you go, and when I’m out for a long walk and not actively on my phone, I don’t often remember to do that. I would not mind at all having to watch multiple ads back to back to make up the revenue for a longer walk if it meant not having to baby my phone in order to get the most out of my longer walks.

In the last 10 days, this crappy app stopped allowing me to finish walks. It would basically keep continuing the same walk. That was annoying but since it’s really hot, I haven’t been walking much since the end of June. This goes all to heck tonight when I realize after repeatedly shutting down the app, checking for updates, and shutting down the phone, to try to fix the problem, the only way to “fix” it was to delete and reload the app. In so doing, I managed to lose 4 months of walks. Great. Just wonderful. Thank you for this crummy app, which never discloses just what you contribute to your charity (if you ever even actually PAY the charity), but also us so glitchy that it sometimes doesn’t record walks properly. And to add insult to injury, I lost around 10 levels and miles of walks recorded for the history with my dogs and presumably for the benefit of my charity. Do better. It’s a great concept but really shoddy execution and disclosure.

Update: after deleting and reinstalling the app still crashes constantly and the developers never got back to me. I like tracking the walks I do with the pups and this app was very helpful. I recommended it to many people. I received one or two notifications of donations made to my shelter of choosing on my behalf. I downloaded the app two years ago and have logged more than 1000 miles in walks. The new app, Wooftrax (it was called “Walk for a Dog” before) has better maps than before and you can pause the walks if needed, which I liked. But the new app also has some sort of glitch and crashes in the middle of my walks. In the last few weeks I noticed many times that the app crashes without me even touching my phone and as a result it’s logging shorter walks than we are doing. At first I thought it may be something with me using other apps simultaneously but that doesn’t make any sense and many times the app crashes while the phone is in my pocket. I contacted the developers two weeks ago and did not hear from them. I deleted the app and reinstalled it. It recovered my information and I will report if that helped. I don’t recommend the app anymore.