Polarsteps reviews
What users love and hate, from real reviews
A semi-automatic travel diary that tracks your route on a map and lets family and friends follow a whole trip in one place — beloved for exactly that, right up until the actual GPS tracking and small editor limits get in the way.
What users love
One feed instead of spamming photos across every messenger
The core reason people love it: post once and all your family and friends see the route, photos and comments — without flooding WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook with separate updates.
love this app to track our travels and keep friends and family updated without it going out and flooding social media
Great to not spam Instagram or Snapchat but have my 65+ year old dad follow my trips as well
A lot easier to follow on Polarsteps than on Facebook.
The route map turns a trip into a visual story
The line on the world map with «steps» pinned along it is the standout feature: you can see how you move from place to place, and the people back home know exactly where you are right now.
I love that you can see where on the globe you are and how you travel from place to place.
Great app to put all your memories on a map!
the maps of the country are a great way to track an individual and understand exactly where they are posting about
A diary that reminds you where you've been
People keep it as a personal trip journal: photos plus day-by-day notes help them not mix up place names afterwards and relive the route years later.
so helpful when showing people where I went as I forget names easily
acts as a travel diary, with photos, to look back upon my past travels
come back on my pictures and journey anytime I want to refresh my memories
The printed photo book at the end is what keeps people loyal
The auto-assembled book with route, weather and photos is a recurring reason for praise on its own: people look forward to it and buy it as a physical keepsake of the trip.
Then at the end we printed an epic book (over 380 pages!) which houses rich memories. GOATED.
The photo book created at the end of 4 weeks in Europe was so good we bought it.
easy to order a printed book with weather info, route and its steps
A clean private circle — no ads, no peanut gallery
Being private and ad-free is valued in its own right: only a chosen audience can follow, only your own people comment, and there's barely any visible monetisation.
not from the peanut gallery like in other social networks
no sign of ads or other monetisation so far
love that that there are no adds
What users hate
GPS tracking draws straight lines instead of the real route
The most painful technical issue: even on «high accuracy» with every setting dialled in, the route collapses into straight segments, and switching to a less accurate mode wipes earlier waypoints entirely — a bug that's lived for years without a fix.
makes it delete waypoints of previous trajectory after you switch to less accurate tracking. The issue has been there for years and no fix.
both mine and my friends just straight lines the routes, and when trying to lock to roads manually to rectify, says no nearby roads found
Elke dag weer enorme rechte lijn uitschieters die er voor zorgen dat het lijkt alsof ik 2x zover loop.
You can't pick a step's cover photo or caption each shot
The single most common request, even from 5★ fans: the step cover is always the first photo, and to change it you have to drag a shot to the front and break the order of the rest; you also can't caption an individual photo.
PLEASE let us choose the picture that will be shown as highlight for each step instead of displaying the first picture of the step!
Missing a way to select one of the photos in a step as cover photo for that step. Now I have to drag one of the photos to the first photo, and then the photos are out of order.
I wish I could add a caption to each photo but you either can't or I haven't worked it out yet.
Comments attach to the step, not the individual photo
Followers can't like or comment on individual photos — only the whole step; you also can't see who liked a particular post, which clips the social side of the app.
followers not being able to comment on individual photos, and only the entire step
doesn't even let you make comments on each photo
I can't see which followers have liked a particular post.
Editing after the fact breaks the route tracking
Going back to fix text or photo order in a published/draft step throws off the tracking and loses the edits; after one update you also couldn't change the arrival date anymore.
If you go back and edit your writing later it will upset the tracking process.
if you are changing the order of the pictures in a draft and change between apps, only for just 1 second the order gets all messed up again, and loses all text changes
After updating the app, I now find that I can not change the arrival date.
Adding a trip retroactively is a struggle
The app doesn't use the location data baked into photos to place steps, so reconstructing a route after you get home is hard; if you forgot to «start» the trip on time, there's no obvious way to backfill past places.
The app does not seem to use the location data stored in photos to add "steps" making it difficult to add a trip after the fact.
haven't discovered a way to add in previous places if for some reason you forgot to start the trip when you started
I miss that the meta data from the pictures takes it over
Sign-in, device verification and invite links fall over
For some users the app dies at the very entrance: sign-in works through neither Google nor email, there's an «error verifying your device», and an invite link to someone's trip doesn't actually open the trip after install.
sign in does not work, neither with google nor with email
There was an error verifying your device.
I have a link for someone else's trip, asks to install the app, does NOT link the trip invitation.
Notifications about new posts arrive unreliably
Even happy users get flaky pushes: notifications about friends' new steps don't always arrive, or are simply wrong, so people have to open the app and check manually.
I don't always receive notifications but everything else seems to work just fine.
de meldingen kloppen vrijwel nooit
Sometimes I don't get notification of new posts