What is Squadrats?
Squadrats cuts the world into squarish tiles and asks you to go stand in them. A squadrat is "approximately one mile by one mile" in their own words, and it becomes yours the moment you enter it, no matter how deep. There is a second, finer grid on top: squadratinhos, where 64 fit inside a single squadrat, so roughly an eighth of a mile on a side — small enough that a commute picks some up. Each grid then scores you two ways. Your yard is the largest connected blob of tiles where every tile touches its neighbours to the north, east, south and west. Your übersquadrat is the largest solid square you can carve out. Do the same on the small grid and you get a yardinho and an übersquadratinho.
Strava is how most people feed it. The account itself is separate — you sign up with email, Google, Apple or Facebook, not with Strava — and then you authorise Strava from inside Squadrats. It asks to view data about your activities, and the authorisation screen makes you pick between all activities and public activities only. Connecting starts an import of what is already in your account rather than only counting rides from that day on, and after that new activities arrive on their own. The only traffic in the other direction comes from the phone app: it records an expedition itself and can auto-upload it to Strava. Per-activity there's a Resync button (Strava doesn't tell Squadrats when you crop an activity, so you have to ask) and a crop tool of its own.
What separates it from its neighbours is that it is only the game. Wandrer counts unique roads against OpenStreetMap; CityStrides counts streets completed; StatsHunters and VeloViewer are statistics platforms where tiles are one feature among Eddington numbers, badges and power curves. Squadrats has no stats section to speak of, and that focus is why Škoda's We Love Cycling put it top of its April 2026 tile-hunting comparison — the reviewer's argument was speed and polish, calling the map faster and smoother than anything else in the category. The company is Polish, based in Warsaw, and its own subscription pitch notes it ran almost six years free of charge and ad-free before Pro existed.
Key Features
Two grids, four trophies
Squadrats for long days out, squadratinhos for the ride to work, and on each grid a yard (biggest connected area) and an über (biggest perfect square). The two goals pull in opposite directions — the yard rewards sprawl, the über rewards filling in the gaps you skipped — which is most of the reason people end up riding down cul-de-sacs.
A route-planner extension for Chrome, Firefox and Safari
It draws your grid inside someone else's route builder: Strava, Garmin Connect, RideWithGPS, Komoot, Hammerhead Karoo, VeloPlanner, Mapy, GPX Studio and BRouter/bikerouter. So you can see which squares a route would actually win before you ride it. Two caveats. It's desktop-only — the site says so outright when you open the install page on a phone. And planning somewhere is not the same as syncing from there: Komoot, RideWithGPS and Hammerhead work as planners, but the activity still has to reach Squadrats through Strava or Garmin. The Chrome listing shows 20,000 users and a 4.7 from 74 ratings, last updated August 2026.
A phone app that lights tiles up as you ride
iOS and Android apps arrived in 2026. They record rides, runs and walks themselves, with pause and resume, and new squadrats light up on the map the moment you reach them rather than after the upload. Finished expeditions can auto-upload to Strava. Google Play shows 10,000+ downloads.
Standings, global and regional
Everyone gets ranked globally. Pro is what unlocks tracking your squadrats per country and region separately, ranking against other squadrateers inside those regions, and the full standings instead of a partial view. It also unlocks looking at another athlete's squadrats, which on the free tier is a prompt to upgrade.
Rules with actual teeth
Muscles, wind or gravity only. Motor vehicles are out, with e-bikes the single exception, and the terms spell out the ban down to lawn mowers and golf carts. You can't backdate that 1999 school trip by hand — their FAQ says no, only activities you personally recorded on a GPS device — and you can't touch the recorded path, distance or duration.
Strava isn't the only pipe
Garmin connects directly, and their own FAQ names Strava and Garmin together as the two that let Squadrats read your activities. The connect screen also carries Coros, Polar, Suunto, Wahoo, MapMyFitness and RideWithGPS. Komoot is explicitly ruled out: Squadrats says Komoot doesn't allow it to access your activities at all.
Who It's For
- Tile hunters who want the game and nothing else — no badge cabinet, no Eddington number, no power analysis, just the squares
- City riders and runners who'll get more out of the 200-metre squadratinho grid than a mile-wide one
- Route planners who'd rather see the missing squares inside Strava or Garmin Connect than flip between two tabs
- Anyone who navigates by phone, since the mobile app shows tiles filling in live instead of after the upload
