I'm Dan. I write the code and my partner Sheila is the prettiest, most critical beta tester there is. Between the two of us that's the whole of Unterra - no wider team, no investors, no growth department deciding what happens to your location history. Just us.
Your journey history, explored coordinates, and manual reveals live on your own phone. We don't keep a database of where you've been, because neither of us want to be the person holding that data.
Unterra is paid for by the people who use it. There are no ads, no trackers sold to a broker, and exactly one optional upgrade - Unterra Pro. That's the entire business model.
Write to support@npdesigned.com and you reach the two of us directly, not a ticket queue. Bug reports, as well as user requests, genuinely change what gets built next.
My partner and I have always loved taking new roads. Not the fastest route, just the one we hadn't driven yet. Somewhere along the way we started wondering how much of our own city we had actually seen, and neither of us could answer it.
Around the same time I was playing a driving game with a road-completion meter that tracked every stretch of tarmac you'd touched, and it was quietly addictive. Filling in that map was more compelling than winning the races. We wanted that meter for the real world.
So I built it, and my partner has been the first pair of eyes on every version since. Unterra covers your map in fog and lifts it where you've physically been. It turns out the answer to "how much of my city have I seen?" is usually humbling, and once you have a number you start driving differently. It has genuinely made us take the long way home more often.
An app that lives in your background and watches your location has to earn that privilege. Here's how we've tried to.
All your data stays on your phone. I wouldn't want some App constantly sending my location to some datacenter, so we never will.
City and region borders come from OpenStreetMap through a boundary service I run myself, so the app isn't at the mercy of a public API's rate limits. It answers questions about map borders. It isn't sent your travel history.
A local database of boundaries ships inside the app. The best exploring happens where there are no bars of service, so the fog has to lift with or without a network connection.
Background tracking leans on your phone's own hardware motion detection, suspending GPS when you're sitting still and waking it when you move. It runs on our own two phones all day, every day, so an exploration app that dies by lunchtime is a problem we'd feel first.
There's no roadmap committee here. If you want Unterra to do something it doesn't do yet, ask us.
Some of Unterra's current features exist because somebody wrote in and asked for it. We can't promise every idea ships, and some take a while, but every single one gets read by the two of us and genuinely shapes what gets built next.
If you found a bug, have an idea for a feature, or you just want to tell us how much of your hometown you've uncovered, we'd like to hear it.
Common questions are answered on the support page. Everything else comes straight to our inbox.
