Strut

I have been playing this for a couple years, along with a couple other GPS type games. Maybe that’s the problem. 1: I love this game and play it frequently. 2: If this app is in the background it is quite likely (not always, but often) to stop recording your tiles until you bring it to the foreground again (or restart it - sometimes bringing it back to the foreground doesn’t cut it) 3: On some of the screens the contrast makes the text absolutely unreadable. Example: the “score” screen - no matter which of the very limited “theme” options I pick, I cannot read lines 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10. Why did you make the text dark grey on a slightly darker grey background, in what I swear is 4 pt font??? 4: the server running this is ridiculously slow. Get used to seeing the spinning equivalent of an hourglass when changing screens. 5: I don’t understand why they even tried to make an Apple Watch app for this. It is broken beyond belief - don’t even try it. I thought it was because I had a non-cellular Apple Watch - nope. It was equally useless on my cellular Apple Watch. Listen - I like the concept of the game. I still play it (without the Apple Watch) - but a little attention from the developer is sorely needed. I would even pay a small monthly subscription fee for it - but only if the above mentioned issues were resolved. Download it and play it - it is fun - but understand the issues going in.

This app is a great way to entice you to visit new places. Unlike other GPS games there is no upkeep, just unlocking new squares, so you don't have to worry about other people stealing your territory of making the app less fun for you. In truth it isn't really a game, just a list of places you've been. The only gamification is the comparing of highscores for different areas which if you follow the spirit if the app won't even matter to you as you'll be exploring new places and uncovering hidden treasures in places you thought you knew well. The best thing that sets Strut above other GPS games is that you can collect tiles without using cellular data, just have wifi on to get the GPS signal (not even connected) and you can upload the tiles when you get home so it won't cost you any extra data! Taking out flight tiles is not about penalizing frequent flyers, it is about making collections more accurate. With flight tracking whole flight paths across the country could sometimes count for multiple cities at once making the leaderboards meaningless. There are a few bugs that make the leaderboards not quite accurate, like a few random tiles counting outside the cities they should. Sometimes tile counts don't sync quite right and the boundaries in rural areas can be way bigger than they should be. So another reason not to take it too seriously.

Updating my review after a conversation with the developer. I'm really bummed that this release ends flight tracking, and hope they find a way to bring it back soon. As this is a free app, server costs for storing and analyzing the tens of millions of unlocked tiles has become an issue, and flights are by far responsible for the bulk of unlocked tiles. I hope they can find a way to reduce their overhead and improve the performance of the app. To the people happy that other people's scores are going to drop: think about how other competitive events put participants into classes so that they're ranked against others under similar conditions. It's not unfair that other people fly more than you, there just needs to be a way to separate the participants. The obvious solution to me here is to work with the data in Strut to present multiple leaderboards: one including flight data and one without. This would satisfy everyone, and keep in place the effort that people have put in place to track their data for years. Frequent flyers in Strut enjoy competing against each other too. Remember the race to 1 million tiles? Still one of my favorite apps out there, it's just going through growing pains now.