What is Unlock Earth?
Unlock Earth keeps a collection of the places you've moved through. Connect Strava and it checks each qualifying activity against real municipality boundaries, sourced from government and international open-data providers. Cover enough distance inside one municipality in a single activity and it's yours, permanently, even if you delete the activity from Strava later.
It's a new app for iPhone and iPad (the iPad version can also be installed on Apple silicon Macs, though Apple marks it as not verified for macOS). Version 1.0 came out on September 30, 2026, and 1.1 on October 4. The App Store lists Eirik Enger Karlsen as the seller; the legal pages name SP Karlsen Invest.
Key Features
Real boundaries, a distance rule
Each municipality (or the local equivalent) unlocks when one activity covers enough distance inside it. The sports added in version 1.1 each have their own distance goal, listed in your profile, and the recent-activity feed names the place you unlocked or says how close a near miss came.
A lot of sports count
At launch: running, hiking, cycling, gravel, mountain biking, cross-country and backcountry skiing. Version 1.1 added alpine skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, e-bike rides, kayaking, canoeing, rowing, stand-up paddling, swimming, surfing, ice and inline skating, roller skiing, skateboarding, wheelchair, handcycle and rock climbing, and pulls in your earlier Strava activities in those sports over the following days.
Achievements and World Firsts
Dozens of achievements, from your first unlock to a whole country. Be the first person ever to claim a municipality and you get a World First, which other users can see.
A map of it all
Your unlocked places on a map that opens on your own area, with place names appearing as you zoom in. You can open the route behind any municipality you've claimed and zoom around it.
Who It's For
- Runners, riders and hikers who like the idea of collecting places rather than tiles or streets
- Travelers, since every new town on a trip in a covered region can count
- Skiers and paddlers, now that version 1.1 counts those sports too
Worth Knowing
Coverage is still growing. The App Store description says Europe and Australia launched fully covered, and version 1.1 added Central America, the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the US Virgin Islands. Africa, Asia, the rest of the Americas and the rest of Oceania are planned region by region, and the app shows what's live and what's coming.
You need Strava; there's no other way to bring activities in. The privacy policy says it asks for the read and activity:read_all scopes, which include private activities, and says it doesn't ask for permission to edit, delete or upload anything on Strava. It stores each qualifying activity's type, date, distance and GPS route, along with your Strava name and profile picture. Unlocks and routes are kept indefinitely, even if you disconnect Strava, until you delete your account in the app, which removes everything at once. Data is hosted with Supabase in the EU (Paris).
The first sync of your history can take a while: version 1.1's notes explain that it pauses and resumes by itself.
It's free to download. The App Store page lists it as containing advertising, while the privacy policy says your data isn't used for advertising or sold.
