MMiles
Miles for iPhone and iPad

The travel log that catches the flight your phone slept through.

Miles records every walk, drive, train, bus, ferry and cycle on your iPhone, automatically. No start button, no account, no login. It catches flights too, even though iOS suspends a low power tracker like Miles in the air.

Download on the App Store

iPhone and iPad. Requires iOS 17 or later. English, French, German and Spanish.

  • Eleven transport modes, from a walk to a flight
  • Nothing to press. Nothing to sign up for
  • Your trip history lives on your iPhone
How it works

Miles is asleep for your flight. That is the design, not a bug.

Miles is built to sip battery, which means it is not holding a continuous, high power location session open all day. It steps down to low power motion and significant location changes when nothing is happening. That works well on the ground, and it is exactly why it cannot follow you into the air: at cruise there are no significant location changes, no network, and nothing user visible for the app to be doing, so iOS suspends it and eventually shuts it down. Most trackers simply have a hole where your flight was. Miles was built around the hole rather than against it.

  1. Arm

    Miles notices airport context and saves a small piece of state before it loses the ability to do anything.

  2. Expect the silence

    In the air, the app gets nothing. It is not fighting for background time and it is not draining your battery trying.

  3. Reconstruct

    When you land and the phone wakes up, Miles rebuilds the flight from that saved state, a bundled database of 4,045 airports with a match radius for each one, and the barometric climb evidence the phone recorded.

What this is not: Miles does not track your plane live, and it does not read your bookings, your email or your calendar. It works out what happened afterwards, from what your phone measured. No booking, no boarding pass, no button press.

Download on the App Store
Why Miles

Three things it does without being asked.

Every mode, one log, no start button

Walking, running, cycling, e-scooter, car, bus, train, metro, ferry and plane, worked out on your phone from location, motion and the barometer. Motorbike is there too, you tell it once, because it cannot be reliably told apart from a car by sensors alone. Eleven modes in one log. Drive to the station, take the train, walk the last part, and you get three trips with the right mode on each, without touching the app.

When it gets one wrong, and it will sometimes, the fix is a couple of taps on the trip itself. The correction sticks, and it feeds forward in a deliberately unclever way: once you have made the same journey three or more times with one mode dominant, Miles starts applying it to new trips on that route by itself.

A history that is yours, not a company's

Your trips live in a database on your iPhone. There is no Miles account, no login and no Miles server, so there is no company that can change its retention policy, no migration deadline, and nothing to lose access to if a service is discontinued.

The honest flip side, said here rather than in a review: no server also means no cloud copy of your log. There is no iCloud sync in version 1.0. What there is, free on every tier, is Back Up Everything and Restore from Backup in the app's settings: one file that holds your whole history and reads back onto another iPhone.

Private by architecture

No account. No login. No Miles server. Your routes, places and times are on your device and nowhere else.

Private Areas: draw a circle around home or work. In a CSV export and in a shared image, the trip's start and end points inside that circle are blanked. In a route drawn on a shared image, every point inside the circle is dropped, not just the ends. Trips affected by a Private Area are kept out of the iPhone search index entirely rather than partially redacted. Omitted, not blurred. On your own device your trips stay complete.

Export everything as CSV, free, with no subscription. Delete everything in two taps. Raw GPS points are pruned after processing and kept for at most 7 days.

Some things do leave your phone, and we would rather tell you than have you find it in the privacy label. Here is the full list.

Privacy, in full

What leaves your phone, and what does not.

Most apps put this in a policy nobody reads. Here is the whole thing, in the order that matters.

Stays on your iPhone

  • Your trip history: routes, coordinates, places, distances, times and transport modes
  • Your corrections, and the patterns Miles learns from them
  • Motion and workout data used to classify trips. Nothing is written back to Health
  • Raw GPS points, pruned after processing and kept for at most 7 days

Leaves your phone, and exactly what

  • A single coordinate, to name a place or a nearby station: Apple geocoding, OpenStreetMap Overpass, Transitland and regional public transport services
  • A single coordinate, for weather and elevation along a route: Open-Meteo, Open-Elevation
  • One airport and one time window, to name a flight: an open flight registry
  • Anonymous usage statistics and crash reports, through Google Firebase Analytics and Crashlytics: app opens, onboarding started and completed, trip classification events (mode, confidence, distance), corrections and confirmations, paywall and subscription events, your iOS and app version, device model, and crashes
  • Firebase Performance is also in the binary. It is linked and initialised, and its collection is switched off in the app's Info.plist, so it is present and inert. It is named here because you would find it

The analytics contain no coordinates, no place names, no route data and nothing from Apple Health, and they are not linked to an identity, because Miles has no accounts and there is no identity to link them to. Crash reports are assembled from an allow-list: a field has to be explicitly permitted before it can be attached, and coordinates and place names are not on the list. The same redactor runs over analytics properties before they reach the SDK, so the rule lives in one place rather than depending on every call site remembering it.

The lookups are lookups, not uploads. Each one answers a single question and carries no Miles account, because none exists.

Miles is closed source, so you cannot audit the binary. What you can check for yourself: the App Store privacy label, the app's privacy manifest, and a network trace of the app running on your own device.

There is no switch to turn the analytics off in version 1.0. That is a fair criticism and it is the most common one I expect. If it matters to you, say so and it moves up the list.

Read the full privacy policy

Pricing

Tracking is free. Always.

The recording, the corrections and the export are the free tier, permanently. Voyager buys the long view of your history, not the ability to record it.

Explorer

Free

Free, permanently.

  • Automatic tracking across 10 transport modes, plus motorbike once you say so
  • Corrections and manual trips
  • Saved locations
  • Core insight cards
  • Your last 120 days on the map
  • CSV export of everything, no subscription needed

Voyager

7 day free trial

On both plans, monthly and annual.

  • Everything in Explorer
  • Your full map history, with no 120 day limit
  • Premium insight cards
  • Travel wrap-up stories
  • Custom date ranges
  • Places insights
Download on the App Store

Local pricing applies in every storefront. Subscriptions are billed by Apple and renew until you cancel in your App Store settings, and cancelling during the trial costs nothing.

FAQ

The questions this category always gets.

How much battery does it use?

Miles is built to sip. It does not hold high accuracy GPS open all day: it varies the accuracy it asks for with what is actually happening and falls back to significant location changes when nothing is. I have not measured that across devices and travel patterns, so I am not going to put a number on it. Check it yourself in Settings, Battery after a week. Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life, which is exactly why Miles is built to use it sparingly rather than continuously. If it is materially worse for you, tell me, because that is a bug report and not a complaint.

What happens when it misses a trip, or gets the mode wrong?

Both happen. Detection is very good, not psychic, and iOS can suspend any app at any time. When a mode is wrong, open the trip and pick the right one: two taps, and it sticks. When a journey is missing entirely, add it manually. Trips Miles is unsure about wait in a short review queue rather than quietly guessing.

If I lose my phone, do I lose my log?

Back Up Everything, in the app's settings under Data, writes a single file holding your whole history: every trip with its route, your saved places, your Private Areas, your achievements. Keep it wherever you keep things. Restore from Backup on the new phone reads it back. Both are free on every tier, because being locked out of your own movement history is the thing we most dislike about this category.

Restoring merges rather than overwrites. Trips are matched on their own identity, so importing onto a phone that already has history adds what is missing and changes nothing else, and importing the same file twice does nothing the second time.

Miles also keeps its database in a folder iOS includes in your iPhone backup, so restoring a new phone from a backup is expected to bring your history with it. We say expected deliberately: we have not yet run that end to end across two devices, and we would rather say so than imply a guarantee we have not tested. Take a backup file as well if you are changing phones. One thing we do already know: photos are linked to your photo library rather than copied into Miles, so on a new phone those links may not resolve even though the trips do.

There is still no iCloud sync in version 1.0, and it stays top of the list for what comes after. The CSV export is unchanged and stays free, but it is for spreadsheets rather than for restoring: it carries no routes, no journeys, no photo links and no achievements, and it blanks endpoints inside a Private Area.

You say private, but you ship Google Firebase. Which is it?

Both are true and neither is hidden. Your trip history stays on your device: there is no account, no login and no Miles server to send it to. Separately, Miles uses Firebase Analytics and Crashlytics for anonymous usage statistics and crash reports, and it sends individual coordinates to open mapping, weather, elevation and transport services to name places, check the weather and identify stations and flights. The analytics never include coordinates, place names, routes or Health data. The full list is above, and it is deliberately above the pricing rather than below it.

Does it track my flight live?

No. Miles is not running while you are in the air, by design: it is a low power background tracker, and a low power background tracker with no signal, no significant location changes and nothing on screen gets suspended. Miles arms at the airport, expects that silence, and reconstructs the flight when you land.

An app you are holding, with the screen on, can still get a GPS fix by a window. What a low power background tracker cannot do is quietly follow you for eleven hours with the phone locked in your pocket, which is the thing Miles is actually trying to be the other 364 days a year.

I came from Google Maps Timeline. What should I know?

Two practical things. Miles cannot import your Timeline history, so your Miles log starts on the day you install it. And Miles has no server, so nothing about your log depends on a company's retention policy.

For context on why people arrive here: Google moved Timeline to on-device storage, only a recent window of history came across for many people, the web view was removed entirely, and Google confirmed in March 2025 that a technical issue had deleted some people's Timeline data.

Do I need an account?

No. There is no sign up, no login, no email address and no password. You install it, grant location and motion access, and that is the whole setup.

Can I get my data out?

Yes, as CSV, free, with no subscription. It is in the app's settings. Data portability is not a paid feature.

Is this a mileage tracker for tax?

No. Miles has no tax rate tables, no business and personal classification workflow and no reimbursement reports. If you need mileage for a tax return, one of the dedicated apps will serve you better. Miles is a log of everywhere you went, for you.

Does it work on iPad? Is there an Apple Watch app?

Miles runs on iPad. There is no Apple Watch app at launch.

Which permissions does it need, and why?

Location set to Always, so trips can be detected while your phone is in your pocket. With "While Using" instead, Miles can only record while the app is open on screen. Motion and Fitness, which is how it tells a walk from a bus ride. Both are asked for during setup, both are explained before the system prompt appears, and both can be declined, in which case Miles still works for manual trips.

Built independently

One developer, in France, more than 140 builds before anyone could buy it.

Miles has no investors, no growth team and no advertising. It reached the App Store after more than 140 internal builds and more than 500 automated tests, and around forty fixes in the tracking code cite the numbered field log from the journey that exposed them. Real flights, not simulations, established that a low power background tracker cannot be present for your flight, and the flight capture was designed around that fact rather than in denial of it.

Features were deleted before launch rather than shipped. A large review screen became one button.

If something looks wrong, say so, and it gets fixed. Support goes to one person and it is answered by that person.

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