GPS tracking for dog walks
Barnaby records every walk: your route on the map, plus distance, time and average pace. One tap starts it, one tap ends it.
Recording a walk
Clip the lead on and tap Start. Barnaby begins recording straight away, joining your positions into one continuous line. From there you can turn the screen off and pocket the phone; it keeps recording until you end the walk.
Recording runs at the highest accuracy the phone offers, gated by a minimum distance: a new point only lands once you've moved roughly five metres. What you watch on the map updates far more often than that — the live view gets almost every fix, while the saved track ticks over more slowly to spare the battery. That's why the line can look a touch more angular afterwards than it did while you were out there.
Pausing and picking back up
If you stop at the dog park, hit Pause. The clock holds, the route holds, and another tap starts it again.
Get in the car and you don't have to remember to tap anything. Barnaby notices sustained vehicle speed and pauses on its own, without the clock or route moving, then picks back up once you're at walking pace again. A pause you started yourself is left alone — only you can end that one.
The gap between pausing and resuming never gets counted as distance. The first point after a pause has no predecessor to measure from, so the stretch between where you stopped and wherever you start again — the drive home, say — never gets added to the walk.
What runs while you walk
Your route grows on the map in real time. Below it sit the time, your current speed and the distance. Average pace and metres climbed come afterwards, in the summary of the walk. For what it adds up to across weeks and months, see statistics.
Where GPS gives up
A recording is only ever as good as the signal behind it. Among tall buildings or under thick tree cover the position jumps and a smooth line turns into a zigzag. No app can code around that.
Android adds its own wrinkle. Barnaby keeps a foreground service open specifically so recording survives with the screen off, but some manufacturers kill background apps anyway to save power. When that happens, reopening the app picks the walk back up where it left off — what's already been recorded is sitting on the device, not waiting in memory to be lost. Only then, with actual evidence it happened rather than as a blanket warning, does Barnaby ask, once, whether you'd like to exempt it from battery optimisation.
Your home stays out of it
Almost every walk begins and ends in the same spot: your front door. Barnaby trims that stretch away before a walk reaches anybody else. How far it trims, and what else is covered, is on the Home Zone page.
Take it anywhere
Every walk exports as a GPX file, the format Garmin Connect and Komoot read. Where the recording carries timestamps, those apps turn it into an activity with pace and moving time instead of a bare shape on a map. Nothing you record is locked inside Barnaby.
Questions about this feature? They live in the frequently asked questions.