Help

Press Start before you drive, or turn on auto-detect and let it notice for you. The app follows your route with GPS and matches it to the road map from OpenStreetMap. The roads you drive turn green and your county and country percentages go up.

A stretch of road only counts once you've driven all of it. That stops a bit of GPS wobble, or turning off halfway, from colouring in roads you didn't really drive. Where a drive starts or stops, you get credit for the part you drove. If you know you drove a whole road and it's still grey, send us an email and we'll have a look.

You can mark it as private or gone in the app and it won't count against your percentage any more. It's worth letting us know too, so we can fix it for everyone, or you can fix it on the map yourself.

Our roads, speed limits and one-ways come from OpenStreetMap, and some of it is out of date. Always go by the signs on the road. You can fix it on OpenStreetMap in a few minutes, and it reaches the app within about a month. Here's how.

Search for a place, or press and hold on the map to drop a pin, then pick a route. Fastest gets you there quickest. New roads takes a route with roads you haven't driven yet, as long as it isn't too much longer. You can also avoid motorways, tolls, ferries and unpaved roads. Directions are worked out on your phone, so once the road data for the area has downloaded they work without signal. Searching for a place needs an internet connection.

The sat nav is a guide, and the signs on the road always come first. Most wrong turns come from the map itself, like a one-way street that isn't marked. Let us know where it happened, or fix it on the map and it'll be right for everyone.

In the route chooser, tap Share to send that route. For a drive you've done, open Drives, pick the drive, tap Share, then Route link. Whoever opens the link in tarmacked sees the route on the map and gets directions to its start (or the other end), then along it. If they leave the route, it brings them back onto it. A shared drive leaves out its first and last few hundred metres, so it doesn't show where you live.

An optional one-time purchase that adds scenic drives (the Wild Atlantic Way, the Sally Gap and more, with your progress on each), the heatmap, and your most driven roads and records. Everything else is free and stays free. Your scenic progress is kept from the start, so it's all there if you unlock later. Bought it before? Settings, then Premium, then Restore purchase.

Ireland and Northern Ireland, with Britain and more countries on the way. New countries arrive with the road data, so the app picks them up by itself. Kilometres or miles is in Settings, under Units.

Bronze at 10% of a county's roads, silver at 30%, gold at 60%, and platinum when you've driven every one. Roads you mark as private or gone come off the total, so platinum is always possible.

Recording uses GPS, the same as any sat nav. If battery is tight, set the GPS accuracy to Balanced or Saver in settings. High is the most accurate, and it's the one to use when your phone is charging in the car.

A safety net for the drives you forget to start. It notices when you set off, records in the background, and asks you afterwards whether to save it. Nothing counts until you say yes, and drives you never answer are deleted after 7 days.

Make a backup in the app (Stats, then Your data, then Back up) and save the file somewhere safe, like iCloud Drive. On the new phone, install tarmacked and restore from that file. Restoring adds to what's already there, so it never wipes anything.

No. Your drives never leave your phone and we don't track anyone. The privacy page has the details.