Two and a half months ago I shipped the first public version of TrailQuest. Since then I’ve been living inside it every single day — debugging, redesigning, rewriting the same button four times.
And somewhere around month two, something predictable happened: I stopped seeing it.
You stop noticing what’s not intuitive. What a fresh pair of eyes opens and immediately gets lost in. What feels obvious to you but makes no sense to anyone else.
That’s the trap of building in public. You need people on the outside.
This release is theirs
Version 1.2.4 didn’t come from a roadmap. It came from two beta testers who took the time to tell me what wasn’t working.
Passing Fox flagged the maps. The Middle-earth trail looked fine to me — I’d struggled with it for weeks. I was so happy to see it live and running that I forgot about everything else. To him, the companion markers were missing and the map felt rough compared to what you’d expect from a real-world navigation app. He was right. We rebuilt the map widgets, tuned the compass, and rebalanced the visual layers from scratch.
Amo noticed the navigation. Getting around the app required too many taps. There was no Home button in the main navbar. Swipe gestures didn’t work between screens. There were no intuitive shortcuts. Four separate pieces of friction — none of which I noticed anymore, all of which he caught immediately.
This is what open beta is for.
What’s new in 1.2.4
- 🗺️ Smoother maps — Major overhaul of map widgets, compass, and visual layers. The Middle-earth map now feels as polished as the real-world trail maps.
- 👥 Companions live on the map — Friends’ avatars, their trail progress, their exact position — visible directly on the map without extra tapping.
- ⚡ Deep navigation shortcuts — Tap your step count → jump to statistics. Tap the streak fire → streak detail. Tap TrailCoins → inventory. Tap your step source → sync settings. No more hunting through menus.
- 🏠 Home is back in the navbar — Simple. Important. You always know where you are.
- 👆 Swipe between screens — Natural left-right movement across all screens in the app.
- ✏️ Cleaner settings — Full rewrite of the Settings screen — unified typography, consistent layout, readable at a glance.
Why I’m telling you this
TrailQuest is in Open Beta. Every step you take — commuting, walking the dog, a lunch break around the block — moves your avatar along one of five legendary trails: the Camino Franécs, Bilbo’s route through Middle-earth, the GR20 across Corsica, the Jesus Trail through Galilee, or the Vrba-Wetzler escape route from 1944.
The app is free. The trails are real. And right now, it runs on feedback from people like Passing Fox and Amo.
If something feels off — tell me. If something works well — tell me that too. Every note counts.
Join the Open Beta
TrailQuest turns your daily steps into real progress on legendary trails — with HealthSpan Score, streaks and trail lore. Free on Android.
▶ Get TrailQuest on Android