Last updated on January 27th, 2026 at 11:00 am
Strut – Strategy Game Review
Strut is a Strategy/Adventure/Navigation game from Thickpolicy LLC, first launched in 5th March 2013.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 68+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Strut Stand Out
Imagine the entire world is covered in billions of tiles. How many can you open up?
Strut is a game of exploration where you compete with other players around the world to uncover the map of the earth.
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TRACK YOUR TRAVELS
Whether you walk, run, bike, drive, sail, ride a goat or take a hot air balloon, use Strut to keep track of exactly where you've been in the world. Share your map with friends, or keep your wanderings private… we won't tell.
EXPLORE YOUR SURROUNDINGS
Take a new route to work. Go down that street you never walked through. Visit every nook and cranny of your city. See more of your neighborhood – who knows what you might find?
OPEN UP YOUR WORLD
Strut around, level up and climb to the top of the leaderboards – there's a top 10 for every city, state, country, and the entire world. There are also a ton of medals to earn, so keep exploring and see what pops up in your adventures around the globe.
You can also now keep track of your tile counts and your Strutting status on your Apple Watch!
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*Please note that continued use of GPS running in the background could dramatically decrease battery life.
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Strut is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 31st October 2025
Recent improvements include:
Fix for background tracking not working.
Download & Availability
Strut is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This app is one of the few on our home screen! We love road trips and hiking. We also love exploring and seeing new sights. We always had a Rand McNally map and yellow highlighter in the car and would mark where Id been. Then Id check the map to pick new, unexplored places. This app allows us to create our own map of our travels. Its easy to see where we havent been yet and encourages us to take new paths. We joined up after they cutoff the air travel folks – hard to compete against those in the industry. After all, you cant say youve been somewhere if you flew over it at 30,000 feet! So now Im getting family and friends involved and am climbing the ranks! If you like maps, exploring and if youre just lil competitive, this is your app.
It's been 2 years since its last update roughly, the app needs major improvements and fixes. It has lost many of our tiles we unlocked and we can't get them back, the app absolutely destroys your battery life which shouldn't even happen as badly with GPS usage anymore (it's worse than Pokemon Go somehow). We love the app but man we think it's time to retire it until they can fix it. It's not cared for anymore.
Reminds us of the polish and pizazz of Advance Wars: Dual Strike, only with (necessarily) better resolution and no real competitive premise other than "have your phone on and go for a hike or ride vehicles for a day, and you will eventually have done that more than some other people who have also downloaded the app." Still, it's very well executed, and probably harmless as long as you can keep your phone charged. Sort of a fun "why not" toy to have, especially if games like CodeRunner and Paraversume are too distracting or involved for you. We noticed that most of the tiles unlocked in our town were done in straight lines that seemed to cross the whole place without turning, and we wonder if that's from spoofers or people riding aircraft. We guess you can't really do anything about the former without joining the (futile) arms race against spoofers. UPDATE: Someone ruined the ability to sign in using Facebook, which seems like a boneheaded maneuver. Logging in with Facebook isnt the same thing as engaging with a billion fascists on Facebook. It was chiefly useful as a tool for logging into games. Not sure why fewer and fewer games allow it, or why none of them offer a reasonable or practical alternative, but we have to assume that its a reversible mistake, so Thickpolicy should reverse theirs as soon as they can.
Cant X out of the level-up banner without closing the app. Terrible interface design. Couldnt even play for 5min. Deleted.
Others are correct that battery drains quickly, so be warned. There aren't really many other bugs, however, and we believe it works well. Our main concern however is we are unable to reset our account with our username. When transfering the app to another phone, we are unable to recover our progress on our account that was never deleted yet. We are not sure whether the account we have lost can still be logged in with our apple id or an email, and we haven't been able to contact them.
We love this app and have been using it since it was first released. Our phone gets very hot when it is tracking our Strut – is there any chance you could optimize the GPS usage so it doesnt chew through the battery? Thanks in advance.
Great concept, but unpolished. Also, drained our battery in 30 minutes, so also useless, would definitely use if improved.
Not sure what is happening but we do not understand why the thickpolicy website asks for donations (to keep this alive) and then when we donate through the app, we dont even get the achievement. Never mind the fact that this app costed a couple bucks to obtain in the first place. If they really wanted to keep it alive, maybe release it on android as well.
We love Strut; Ive been using it for the better part of 4 years. Somewhat like and unlike Strut, we use two apps (Google Maps and Tile) which constantly uses our location. Maybe these apps dont get our location at the same frequency as Strut but they dont drain our battery like Strut does. We really would like to see some effort to reduce battery usage in Strut like the aforementioned apps.
We used to have this app on our old phone, and we really liked it. However, we recently got a new phone, downloaded it, and launched it. The second we were logged into a new account, the game crashed. We reopened it, but the same thing happened. We tried restarting our phone, as well as deleting the app then reinstalling it. Does anyone know the reason to this? This bug isnt happening for any other apps.
This app used to be a lot of fun. It was cool to bring it up and see if you had been there before. Now, it wont track reliably if it is being used in the background. And even if its not running in the background, it crashes pretty regularly.
We like the app but we just dont like that if the app isnt open then it doesnt mark the tiles. It only does that if the app is open or you are on it.
Fun app. However it has stopped tracking once the app is put in the background. We have reinstalled the app and to no avail. The problem persists.
We have been playing this for a couple years, along with a couple other GPS type games. Maybe thats the problem. 1: we 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 doesnt 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 we pick, we 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 we 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: we dont understand why they even tried to make an Apple Watch app for this. It is broken beyond belief – dont even try it. We thought it was because we had a non-cellular Apple Watch – nope. It was equally useless on our cellular Apple Watch. Listen – we like the concept of the game. We still play it (without the Apple Watch) – but a little attention from the developer is sorely needed. We 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.
2021-01-14 update: Back in August, we believe we were in a low cell service area and a new unlocked tile now appeared as Pending Sync instead of adding to our total. Now all new tiles show up as pending. Every once in a while during long trips, a batch of 150 tiles will sync and then our total tiles will go up. However, we are up to 1400 pending sync tiles. At this rate, the pending tiles will never fully catch up. Original review: Still love to use the app, but our big gripe is that it will randomly shut down while strutting; more and more often, too. If you open the iOS camera and take a picture, its almost a guarantee that the app will crash. Hoping we at least get an app update to address all the crashing. Otherwise, no major issues.
We really like the app but our tile numbers for cities have not updated for about a month now. Hopefully it gets fixed soon.
Now it just crashes in the background and says it has tiles waiting to be synced for weeks. Customer service is nonexistent. They never respond. Update: Almost 3 months and still no response from the developer. Update: Almost 300 tiles now that never sync. Decided to try contacting the developer again. We did receive a surprisingly quick response. Ill paste the response to share the information they have about continuing support for the app. Id also like to mention that they have a button on their site to contribute to their operating costs as we definitely believe in donating when you can to small developers, especially when their apps are free. Hi! We are still maintaining it by keeping it alive and paying for service and storage every month and making sure the core functionality at least works with major iOS releases as we have been for the last seven years. We dont charge you anything to use it and have never made any money off it thus far. Several people still use it happily, so we dont see a reason to remove it. Nobody is forcing you to use it. Its a one man support and development team, so forgive us if we havent responded to your previous email.
DO NOT DOWNLOAD This app is abandoned. Super buggy. Constantly crashes. We have 5 YEARS of tiles and data on it thats going to be lost because 1. Support never contacts back. 2. Its connected to Facebook and theres no way to change that and 3. Theres no way to export tiles. We hate that we ever downloaded this app and used it. It was once our favorite app. No longer.
We love maps and exploration. We used to highlight maps to show where Id been and see where we had yet to explore. Several years ago a new type of navigation app came out, one that obscured the areas of a map you hadnt visited while clearly showing roads youd travelled. Ive uncovered quite a lot of territory – so why use another app that sounds like it does the same thing? Because its more fun! Strut allows you to truly hide the unknown world, not just make it hazy. Even if you adjust the options to show more map, you will only get a ghostly, faded image. Also, rather than clearing a single street, the world is divided into tiles – and all it takes to light one up is to step on it (or drove, fly over, etc). We spent many a happy afternoon sitting in front of Final Fantasy, Zelda, Dragon Warrior and other top-down, 8-bit games, controller in one hand and pencils in the other, coloring in squares on graph paper and watching the huge fantasy worlds grow. Now we do the same, only its the real world and our graph paper is our phone! If you remember taping those pieces of graph paper together and finally spotting the round-about path needed to find…well, if this brings back fond memories, get this app now – you wont regret it. :-) Oh – and it IS free, but donate anyway so these folks can keep this app running. We just tossed $20 their way – a lot when you consider the price of most apps, but well worth it.
Fun twist to mapping. Each update adds some neat new tools. We're always looking for struttable moments now (have we been here before?!). Only negative is that it puts a serious drain on your battery, so best to only 'Strut' when you know you'll be covering new terrain. Edit: since the update about a year ago, the scoring has gotten wonky and unreliable. Still a good app, but with a limited/stale user base, its lost a lot of the initial game feel it had initially.
Ive been using this app for 5 years. Its a cool way to see where youve been in the world and realize just how big the world is. Being able to use it on airplane mode is a great feature. Two major negatives, one unavoidable and one easily solvable. The app uses a ton of battery, which makes sense since it uses location tracking. This is unavoidable. The other should be easily solvable but has not been solved in 5 years! When running the app in the background, it often stops tracking randomly and restarts. This is quite annoying, we it could lead to a ton of missing tiles.
This app significantly run out of your power. Considering we use similar location tracking app, this app perform awfully. Every other app didnt have such power consuming problem. Id suggest not to install unless you have power connected all the time.
With the new update we think the app got better! We personally was pretty high in the ranks of strutters and had only taken 4 flights in our whole 2.5 year strutting career. It kind of makes it more fair to people who travel just as much as others, but don't fly as often. This app is still great and we will continue to use it.
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 our review after a conversation with the developer. We're 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. We 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 us 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 our favorite apps out there, it's just going through growing pains now.
Deleting flight tiles is wrong. Flying is traveling too. So it is strutting as well. We may stop using the app.
The kids and we love this! Encourages us to explore new places. Haven't found another app that does it better. Also works really well.
Motivates us to go places and turns commuting and traveling into a game. You can unlock tiles by walking, driving, or flying over them and it's great. But the new version dropped this review from a 5 star review to a 3 star review (which is generous since it's now virtually unusable). It takes up more battery power than ever before (which was already a lot), and on our new phone it doesn't log in and crashes before we can send a help email.
This app was really cool when it was new, but over its lifetime it has been broken for literally years at a time. Rarely receives updates. Runs on a shoestring budget, so instead of optimizing their algorithms for scale, now they are just deleting years of data. Can't believe we donated money a few times. Plus, we're tired of making excuses for all the performance issues when we show the app to people.
Great app and fun to play, but had to delete it. Our battery drained down so fast and the phone actually would get warm. Too bad.
Please tell us how or when this App syncs. We signed out then back in to see if that worked, erased all our data and started us back at day 1! We love we, just tell us how to sync.
We'd give this app 5 stars if we had the option to let it use our location only when we use the app. We're not going to let you drain our battery and eat up our data by accessing our location even when we're not using the app. F that.
Reminds us of the polish and pizazz of Advance Wars: Dual Strike, only with (necessarily) better resolution and no real competitive premise other than "have your phone on and go for a hike or ride vehicles for a day, and you will eventually have done that more than some other people who have also downloaded the app." Still, it's very well executed, and probably harmless as long as you can keep your phone charged. Sort of a fun "why not" toy to have, especially if games like CodeRunner and Paraversume are too distracting or involved for you. We noticed that most of the tiles unlocked in our town were done in straight lines that seemed to cross the whole place without turning, and we wonder if that's from spoofers or people riding aircraft. We guess you can't really do anything about the former without joining the (futile) arms race against spoofers.
We really love this app. It shows so much of our travel history around the US and Japan since we started using it in 2014. That being said, the app needs serious reliability and capability enhancements. Frequent crashes and extremely slow sync speeds have resulted in thousands of lost tiles for us, and we're sure we're not alone. Twice we have donated money to the development team, neither time was it acknowledged in the app as promised. An email to them about the oversight went unanswered (it's been several months now). Unlike a similar (but less cool) app "Fog of World", Strut does not allow a user to record travels on another device, such as a handheld GPS, to later transfer to the iPhone app. FOW allows this through a relatively simple Dropbox interface using common GPX files. That feature alone would make up for the lack of stability in the app itself. In any case, we hope the developers listen to us users. We would make a pretty significant in-app purchase to support the future of the app. Maybe an in-app purchase of $5.99 to store over 30,000 tiles, so we can get hooked on the app then pay a small price to stick with it once we are invested? Maybe $14.99 to add the ability to transfer GPX files from a handheld GPS or similar? Something? Hello.
We do love the idea of this app and have joined since 2013. That said the app keeps crashing when map is opened; we lost thousands and thousands of flipped tiles because it wouldn't sync when in poor Internet connection (3g) and then never did. It drains the battery. It's poorly marketed as well. ( Look at what they did with pokemon go in comparison) They should sell this up to someone who cares about making it better other than letting it due slowly. We're in installing today after we have lost 8k+ tiles from our trip to Italy.
This is a very cool free app,that makes you really want to go the extra mile and explore our surroundings. We absolutely love it Just wish more people played.
The game is to unlock more squares. Encourages you to travel and take unique routes to work. Neat way to see where you've been. Fun stats.
This app is great, we've found lots of cool new places using it, we love that you can make the competition as local or international as you like. The concept alone is wonderful and we've been looking for something like this for a long time. Support is also friendly and helpful, and responds quicker than any other service we know. 100% would recommend.
Love the app but it needs to have the same map that is on the iPhone version. If you would add that it would be the best app ever. Thx.
Total waste of time. Bad idea and a ridiculously stupid game.
Ok…if this were an app/ gps game that was for walkers/ hikers/ runners/ bikers and had a speed control on it to prevent people from uncovering blocks while driving….then we would say…AweSome!!! But what the heck is the purpose of driving around, wasting gas uncovering blocks. What kind of bragging rights are those? Jesus…games these days give hope in getting people off their butts…but then they just sit on them in their cars.
This is one our favorite apps on our iPhone. We love how it gamifies where we travel too, and it is neat to see the different places we've been.
We've been using this app since it first came out, and we've really enjoyed it, but since we got our new phone, all of our tiles are gone! We used our Twitter account to log in to Strut, but now every time we try to log in with Twitter , the app crashes. Please fix this! We want our tiles back.
Looks really good on the iPhone 6.
Wherever you drive, walk. Fly or boat this app will follow your path with a digital breadrumb of your route. You can see the place you often pass over as revealed map tiles, and enjoy the trophy awards as you learn more about you and other users crawling the earth, nifty idea.
Stupid app erased all our data and info, very infuriating, poorly run, and would not recommend.
We like the concept, but the app uses a lot of battery when running (as any GPS app will do).
This app is just what we have been hoping for, for years. We have advertised it to all our friends, and continue to show it off. We're so thankful for it.
Fun app but keeps crashing randomly and since we don't notice until after we've finished driving we have big gaps missing. Also, it requires a phone or wifi connection. Traveled through Germany earlier this year but couldn't unlock and tiles over the ocean or in Europe.
We love this app, it keeps track of all the different place we go as long as we have cell service. Since we primarily travel by air this only works 1/4 of the time…. If the creator would just add support for one of the many Bluetooth GPS pucks on the market this app would be incredible. We also have problems with this app crashing, can we get a option to reboot on crash so we don't have to constantly monitor the app.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 5.5.1
- Size: 10.82 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Thickpolicy LLC
Last updated: 31st October 2025 | Genre: Strategy, Adventure | Developer: Thickpolicy LLC