Journeys

Your usual walk can take you somewhere new

Start a Journey in Kinoku and the walk to the shops, your run before work and the steps you fit into a busy day all move you along a road you have chosen.

At each stop, a picture opens and there is something to read about where you have arrived. You can look around, make a postcard to share, or carry on toward the next one, without a deadline hanging over the weekend.

New in Kinoku 1.4.0, Journeys works alongside your normal tracking, so the road needs no extra activity to be logged.

Which road will you walk?

All three are free from the first stop to the finish. Hadrian’s Wall also comes in a Sandstone Relief edition for Pro, with carved-stone artwork over the same road, while its Roman Fresco edition stays free to walk.

The picker shows a few prints from each road before you start. Every stop’s name and distance are listed too. Most of the artwork stays covered until you reach it, so there is still something to discover after the first look.

What moves your marker

Tracked runs, tracked walks and daily steps can all count. Steps taken during a tracked session are excluded from the extra step credit, so the same walk does not move you twice as far.

Each source has a switch under What counts, and turning one off keeps its earlier distance while new activity from that source stops counting. A road begins on the day you start it, including that day’s qualifying activity. Older workouts stay in your training history without advancing a road you have just started.

Lifting can contribute if you want it to. Gym work starts off, and enabling it uses a stated rule: 2,000 kg of logged volume counts as 1 km. Lifted distance is shown separately from distance you covered on foot. It is an optional way to play, not a claim that lifting a weight is the same as walking a kilometre.

If your steps are not coming through, check the source first. The road can use steps from your phone, a watch or Health Connect; it cannot count movement that none of them recorded. Its page points you to the step tracker when phone counting is off.

How steps become distance

Journeys converts eligible daily steps into an estimated distance. In Kinoku 1.4, ordinary walking steps use 0.762 metres per step. Steps classed as brisk walking use that value multiplied by 1.05, and running steps use it multiplied by 1.20.

For example, 10,000 eligible steps classed as walking add about 7.62 km. The same count classed entirely as brisk walking adds about 8.00 km, while running steps add about 9.14 km. A real day can contain a mix of all three, so a road has no fixed number of steps to finish.

These are the app’s conversion assumptions, rather than a measurement of your own step length. Journeys currently uses the fixed base value even if you have entered your height. A tracked walk or run uses its recorded distance; steps during tracked sessions are excluded from the extra daily step credit.

The stories behind the roads

Each route article explains its places and distances, with sources beside the claims and a full list of the app’s stops.

• The Tōkaidō: a print at the next stop looks at Hiroshige’s work and the road behind its 55 pictures.
• Where was Odysseus, exactly? follows the poem, the uncertain locations and the chosen length of the Journey.
• Walking Hadrian’s Wall, a little at a time explains the trail’s distance and the places along the shorter road.

Look closer at the places you reach

Tap the road to open its full map. The Drawn view, the stop pictures and your progress work offline. Real puts the route on world map tiles and needs a connection to load them.

The Odyssey carries an extra distinction: some places are known sites, others come from ancient tradition or later attempts to place the story. Its stops name the source and how certain the location is. A line across the Mediterranean is useful for following the tale; it is not proof that every island in the poem has been found.

Reached stops can become postcards with the picture, distance and date. Kinoku makes the card on your phone. You decide whether to share it and where it goes.

Keep going at your own pace

There is no finish-by date or missed-day penalty, and one road collects distance at a time. Pause it to try another, and the paused walk keeps its progress. Finish a road and you can start it again; the earlier finish stays in your record.

Find Journeys in the app’s search, or open the road from Steps or Running. Once you have started, the distance to the next stop can sit in Today’s glance bar. The Progress widget also has a free Road view for your Android home screen.

Looking for your first pull-up rather than your next stop? Skill Journeys are the separate training paths for learning a movement. The 1.4.0 release story covers what else changed.