What is Wandrer?
Wandrer matches your GPS tracks against OpenStreetMap and counts the roads you've never been down before. Connect Strava, Garmin, Coros or RideWithGPS and it works backwards through your history, then keeps score: unique miles, and what percentage of a given place (your neighbourhood, town, county, country) you've now covered.
The distinction that matters is against tile games like VeloViewer or Squadrats. Those reward passing through a square. Wandrer only credits road you haven't ridden, so re-riding your usual loop scores nothing unless one street on it is new, and the last 10% of a town is the part that makes you ride dead-end cul-de-sacs. It came out of Concrete Jungle, an Atlanta non-profit that maps fruit trees around the city, which is a fair clue to the sensibility.
Key Features
The map, with the gaps showing
Roads you've travelled are drawn in one colour and the ones you haven't in another, which is the whole hook: you can see the single street between two areas you've covered, and you will go and ride it.
Routing that aims at the blanks
Two tools, both for upgraded accounts and both desktop only. "100% routing" builds a route that covers every road in an area you draw. A-to-B routing gets you from one point to another while picking up as much untravelled road as it can on the way. Wandrer has called the second "definitely in beta."
Maps on the head unit
Export your Wandrer map to a Garmin Edge, a Wahoo ELEMNT or a Hammerhead Karoo, so the untravelled roads are visible while you're out rather than only at home. Free accounts get 10 map downloads; paid ones are unlimited. Upgraded accounts also get a native Karoo app (it needs an internet connection, so a SIM card in the Karoo) and a browser extension that puts the same overlay inside Strava, RideWithGPS, Komoot, Garmin Connect and other planners.
Percentages of real places
Wandrer scores you against defined areas (neighbourhood, town, county, state, country), so "I have ridden 34% of this town" is a real number rather than a vibe. Achievements hang off that, monthly and yearly challenges come with an upgrade, and there's a leaderboard.
An activity editor
Paid accounts can hand-edit a GPS trace. This is less boring than it sounds: in a dense grid or between tall buildings, GPS drift puts you on the wrong parallel street, and without an editor the only fix is riding it again and hoping.
Who It's For
- People bored of their own loops: the map hands you a reason to turn left instead of right
- Completionists, who will take a town from 80% to 100% and discover that the last 20% is all cul-de-sacs
- Commuters and city riders, since new road is dense where you already are
- Runners and walkers, who cover streets a bike would skip and get scored separately for it
- Anyone who has already filled in their tile map and wants a harder version of the same instinct
What it doesn't do
Viewing other people's maps broke at the end of 2024, when Strava tightened its data policies, and it's still gone. Craig, who runs Wandrer, said in April 2026 he was going back to Strava to try to work something out, with no result announced since. Weekend mornings are also the crunch: everyone rides at once, and activity processing has run slow at those peaks, which is what he named as the main engineering focus for 2026. And it is one person, in Girona, doing all of it.
How does Wandrer know which roads I've traveled?
It matches your GPS tracks against OpenStreetMap. Credit is per road segment, not per area, so a familiar loop earns you nothing unless part of it is new to you. Because it's OSM underneath, a road that isn't mapped can't be scored, and the map data you're measured against only refreshes if you're a paid subscriber. Free accounts stay on the data as it was the day they joined, unless they pay $5 for a one-off update.
Does it work for running and hiking?
Yes. Rides, runs, walks and hikes all count, and Wandrer keeps a combined bike-plus-foot view as well as separate ones, which matters because the roads you'd run and the roads you'd ride aren't the same set.
What's the difference between free and Pro?
Free Wandrer syncs 50 past activities from Strava and gives you 10 downloadable maps. Wandrer Extra Lost, at $40 a year, lifts both, with unlimited past activities and unlimited map downloads, and it adds the activity editor, the routing tools, the Karoo app, the browser extension, monthly and yearly challenges and priority processing. On maps, free accounts keep the base map data from the day they joined, with no updates, though a one-off update costs $5. Upgraded accounts get regular updates and can request the latest data on their settings page.
Can I see what percentage of my city I've explored?
Yes, and for the county, state and country too. Upgraded accounts also get a 2026-only mode, which Wandrer added in April 2026 as an experiment for that year: it counts only activities from 2026, Wandrer's answer to a home map that's already too full to be motivating. An iPhone app reached the App Store in September 2026; it records activities and counts new distance on a live map as you go.
