The concept of Polarsteps is simple: schedule your upcoming trips and the app will do its magic. It checks your location from time to time, and plots the results on a colorful map where your family and friends can follow your adventures. As you approve suggested ‘steps’ and add photos, the travel log populates itself. The app also offers a wide range of statistics, such as trip duration, countries visited and distance traveled. If you have no future trips planned, it's also easy to enter past trips and create a rich overview of your travel history. One of the founders tested the first prototype of the app riding his motorcycle from Amsterdam to Cape Town.

Because Polarsteps is optimized for travel, travelers can even track their trips without cell coverage or data roaming. The app synchronizes its data whenever there's a pocket of cell reception — or after logging in to the Wi-Fi at the hotel at the end of a day of travel. Polarsteps uses energy efficient technology to track your location, which means that a full day of tracking only takes a few percent off your battery.

“The beta version of Polarsteps became available on iPhone only last year, yet travellers have already used it in nearly every corner of the earth. Right now we've seen people tracking trips in 177 out of the 195 countries that exist.”, says Polarsteps co-founder and CEO Koen Droste. “We were receiving tons of requests for an Android version and are very excited to bring our app to a new platform. This is only the beginning though, in the near future Android users can expect features such as push notifications for new steps of friends and the possibility to instantly order a beautiful photo album of their trips.”

Polarsteps is created by a bunch of enthusiastic adventurers with a passion for travel, design and coding. The Amsterdam-based startup aims to built the place to go to for multi-destination travelers that want to plan, track and remember their trips. The first prototype of Polarsteps was invented when co-founder Niek Bokkers wrote a small app on a Transatlantic sailing trip that shared trip updates with his family via a satellite phone. His trip went viral among fellow travelers, who loved the concept of an automatic travel tracker. Based on those experiences, the beta version of Polarsteps for iPhone was launched last year. In March 2016 the company raised a €500.000 investment, which is used to further develop its product and build the Android app that is available as of today on the Play Store.

Polarsteps for Android and iPhone can be downloaded now at www.polarsteps.com/app. An intro video of the app is available on YouTube.