Thinking about giving Wandrio a try? Sit with it a moment longer, because it might change your life. Mine it changed for the better, but it brought some downsides too. Here’s an honest list of 11 things Wandrio has changed for the worse.
Put simply, the world doesn’t look the same through the eyes of a Wandrio user. Everywhere you go outdoors, you start seeing uncollected virtual tiles. Doing a plain old loop around your usual running route just doesn’t feel the same anymore.
1. Ordinary running routes no longer cut it
Before Wandrio, a three-kilometre jog could be perfectly enough. And honestly, it still is. But as a Wandrio user you notice that a 500 meter detour gets you four new tiles. Pretty quickly, a “good route” stops meaning the fastest and shortest one and starts meaning the one that collects the most tiles. The art museum is 800 metres away on the map , for you it somehow becomes two kilometres.
2. You start taking tiles far too seriously
A normal person looks at a map and sees forests, lakes, roads and cities.
A Wandrio user spots the one uncollected tile in the middle of an otherwise perfect area.
And it starts to bother them. You think about it as you fall asleep and again when you wake up. Probably enough that you eventually head out specifically to go get it. And in the worst case, you drag friends along with you.
3. Wandrio isn’t finished
Wandrio is still in development. There are bugs, things change, and plenty of features we’ve designed are still waiting to be built.
If you want a fully polished product where everything works exactly as you expect, it might be worth coming back later.
If instead you want to use a service as it evolves and influence what we build next, you’ll probably feel right at home. We have an active WhatsApp group where we collect feedback from users constantly and keep adding new features.
4. Wandrio isn’t for everyone
If you want to run the same loop forever, ride the same cycling routes and don’t particularly long for new places, Wandrio may not be for you.
And if you want to play a game from the couch without putting in the effort to collect tiles, Wandrio isn’t for you either. The app stores are full of games that offer easy entertainment with no exercise involved. One of those might be a better, and more addictive fit.
5. Your old adventures start to sting
You remember a great hike from ten years ago, a cycling trip in the Alps, or some other unforgettable journey, a sailing trip to the Arctic, say.
Then you realise there’s no GPS recording of it.
And so it doesn’t show up on your Wandrio map.
Before long you may find yourself digging through old watch recordings and GPS files just to get your past back onto the map. Or hunting for a boat’s chartplotter in the basement.
This device maybe holds the data from Ristos trip around the Arctic Sea.
6. Everything has to be recorded
Some people believe runs and adventures shouldn’t be captured with a watch, a phone, a GPS track or photos at all. They should simply be experienced and enjoyed in the moment. Carpe diem.
That’s a perfectly good way to move through the world.
But then Wandrio probably isn’t the right service for you.
Wandrio is built on the idea that your adventures leave digital trace and data. If even starting a GPS recording feels wrong to you, Wandrio is unlikely to change your mind. What Wandrio does is it changes your behaviour: suddenly you want to record every grocery run and every road trip stop, because that’s how you collect tiles and climb the leaderboard.
7. This isn’t a competition about who’s fastest
If the most important thing is being fastest up a particular hill or along a particular stretch of road, there are great services for that. You can race Strava segments when the tailwind is just right and take the top spot.
In Wandrio, speed isn’t the point.
We’re more interested in where you went, what you found, and whether you visited somewhere you’d never been before.
What matters most is being outside and discovering new places, day after day.
8. Your holidays change character
Your partner might think you’re heading off for a relaxed weekend in Stockholm.
You notice your Wandrio map there is almost empty.
Suddenly an 11-kilometre walk to the restaurant via three parks and one completely arbitrary residential neighbourhood starts to feel like an extremely sensible idea. Part of the relaxing holiday turns into exercise. You start suggesting destinations that happen to sit in conveniently tile-shaped places. Your partner may be less thrilled when you’re touring industrial estates instead of landmarks. A Wandrio user, though, sees beauty, or at least tiles everywhere.
9. We’re not a game studio
The Wandrio team is made up of experienced entrepreneurs and software builders. We’ve built applications for industry and finance, among others.
Game developers we are not.
What we do share is that we’re all adventurers in our own way. We orienteer, we sail the world’s oceans, we run ultras, we cycle, and we happily set off to see where an unknown trail leads.
If you’re looking for a perfectly polished game experience, you won’t get that from us yet. We’re learning constantly and making Wandrio better one step at a time.
Our goal is to build an app that gets people moving and exploring new places — one we use ourselves every day. Wandrio is passion, not yet 100% expertise. But passion helps you get better day by day.
10. You can’t finish Wandrio — the map is never complete
You finish collecting one area and notice the next one beside it. You grow your cluster and start eyeing what lies outside it.
Then you’re on a train, looking out the window, and catch yourself thinking there’d be an awful lot of uncollected tiles out there.
A finished map doesn’t really exist. If you only want to play games you can complete 100%, Wandrio isn’t for you. Collecting the tiles of a single city can take years.
11. You might start moving for no good reason
This is perhaps Wandrio’s worst problem.
A ten-kilometre run is no longer just ten kilometres. It can be 18 new tiles, a new forest road and a place you’ve never been before.
At its worst, you find yourself heading out with no training plan, no target pace and no particular purpose.
You just go to see what’s out there.
So maybe you shouldn’t start using Wandrio after all. Especially not if you want to travel the same routes forever, compete only on speed, keep all your adventures unrecorded, or use only fully finished apps.
But if you enjoy finding new places, and you like the thought that the whole world could be one enormous map waiting to be explored, your situation is a little trickier.