How it works, and how to reach a person.

A map that starts blank and fills in where you actually walk. Each dot is one hexagon of ground about twenty-five metres on a side — solid where you spent time, hollow where you only passed through. Finish enough of a district and Mote names it for you.

It runs in the background. There is nothing to start, nothing to check in to, and no goal unless you set one.

Because the whole product is a map that fills while your phone is in your pocket. While Using the App means iOS only hands Mote your location while Mote is on screen — so the map would fill in only for the minutes you spend looking at it, which is the one time you are not out walking.

Mote does not ask on the first launch. You get a sample map first, then it asks for While Using, then you watch the map start filling with real ground, then it offers to dig years of it out of your photo library. Always is the sixth thing, not the first — by then you have seen what it is for, and you can say no to it knowing exactly what you are declining.

Mote keeps working, less well, and it tells you which of the three states you are in rather than quietly doing nothing.

Always — the map fills in while the app is closed. This is what it is for.

While Using the App — the map fills in only while Mote is open. The app says "Mote only records while it is open" in the You tab, with a way straight to Settings. It is a real, usable mode; it is just a smaller one.

Denied — the app says "Mote is not recording new places." Nothing new is added. Everything already on your map is still there, still explorable, still exportable — and the Excavation still works, because that reads your photo library rather than your location. A map built entirely out of old photographs is a perfectly good map.

Every permission Mote asks for can be refused, and the app is honest and degraded rather than broken when you refuse one.

Delete the app. That is the complete answer for almost everyone, and it is complete because there is no account to close and no copy of your map anywhere else. Your cells, your notes, your journal, your private zones and your settings all live inside the app's own container and go with it.

If you have been in a shared canvas, leave it first and the rest happens for you. Leaving removes the canvas from your phone and deletes your sealed block from the server, in that order — the deletion is asked for before anything local is cleared, because clearing the phone first would destroy the two things the request needs.

Two cases where a block is left behind, and I would rather explain them than round them off. If the network is down when you leave, you still leave — being stuck in a canvas because of a dead connection would be the worse bug — and the block stays. And if you delete the app without leaving first, nothing has told the server. There is a routine written to sweep up blocks nobody has touched in ninety days and it is not scheduled to run, so I am not going to call it a retention window.

In both cases what is left is ciphertext, filed under an identifier that cannot be reversed back into the code, and the key never reached the server — so nobody there can read it. If you want it gone now: email me and I will remove it by hand. I will need the canvas code, because it is the only thing that identifies the block — and yes, that is the same code that would decrypt it, so send it only if you are content that I could.

You → Export your map. It writes JSON and GeoJSON, all of it, free, with nothing held back and nothing behind a purchase.

JSON is Mote's own shape — complete, and it reads back in. GeoJSON is the standard one, and it opens in map software that is not Mote. That second file is the one that makes the promise real: a file only this app can read would be a trap with extra steps.

One thing to know before you put the file anywhere: the export is your whole map, including your private zones. Those are left out of a shared canvas, never out of your own copy. The app says this on the screen, above the button, on purpose.

A canvas is one map shared between up to eight people. Everyone sees where everyone has walked, drawn in their own colour — and nothing about when, in what order, or how fast.

You start one and get a 22-character code, or you type in somebody else's. That code is the encryption key. Your phone uses it to derive an identifier by a one-way hash, and separately an encryption key that never leaves the phone. Your cells are sealed before they are sent, so the server holds an id it cannot reverse and a block it cannot read. Anyone holding the code can read the canvas, so send it the way you would send a key — and not in a public post.

Private zones are applied first. Mote finds your densest clusters on the device and drops those dots before anything is encrypted, so they are absent from what is published rather than hidden by a query. You can shrink a zone at any time and nobody in the canvas is told, which is deliberate: someone who needs to quietly share less should not have to announce it.

There is no discovery, no search, no friend suggestions and no way for a stranger to reach you. A canvas is invite-only and capped at eight.

Rotate the canvas. Everyone keeps the map they already have, a new code is minted, and the old one stops working — hand the new code to whoever should stay.

What rotating cannot do is reach into somebody's phone and remove what they already downloaded, and Mote will not pretend otherwise. Leaving the canvas has the same limit, and the app says so in those words rather than in softer ones.

No, and it cannot. Mote reads when and where each photograph was taken — the two facts your library already has indexed — and never asks for the image itself. No pixel of any photograph is read, decoded, copied or sent. That is enforced in the build, not just intended.

When you pick a photograph to give a region its colour, Mote keeps a reference to it in your own library rather than a copy.

Because it does not know. Mote records places, not routes — a set of hexagons with no path through them — so it can tell you the ground you covered and genuinely cannot tell you the distance.

That is the same property that makes a shared canvas a shape rather than a story. If the app kept the ordering and the timings that a distance needs, a shared map would be a record of your movements, and it would only be private because I said so.

If you allow it, Mote reads three things from Health: your step count, which it shows beside your map, and your average heart rate and active energy across a journey, which it shows on that journey. It never asks for more than the last thirty days.

Read only — the app requests no permission to write, so it cannot put anything into Health even by mistake, and the sheet iOS shows you says read rather than read and write. Nothing read from Health leaves the phone, and none of it can reach a shared canvas.

Steps are shown, never scored. They unlock nothing and appear on no board.

If no steps appear, it is one of two things and Health does not say which: either it was not allowed, or this phone has none recorded. Apple withholds that difference from apps on purpose, because telling an app that a read was refused would leak that you had something to hide.

Offline, entirely. The boundary data that names your districts is inside the app rather than fetched, so the map works with the radio off and in a country you have never opened it in.

On battery: Mote uses the motion sensor to tell walking from riding, so a train never counts as a walk — and so the GPS can switch itself off when you are standing still. There is no background network activity to spend anything on. I am not going to quote you a percentage until I have measured it over a full week on a real phone, which is happening now; ask me and I will tell you where that got to.

Two common ones. A district you have walked has not unlocked — administrative boundaries come from open datasets and they disagree with each other at the edges, so tell me which district and I will look at the source. Dots along a road you drove — a vehicle should be recorded coarsely rather than as a walk, and you can mark a journey as one after the fact, which permanently reduces the detail of its path.

Neither needs your map. The name of the place is enough.

You can't yet — Mote is not out. When it is, this page will say so and there will be a link here. Nothing on this site pretends otherwise in the meantime.