Why do I now "bank" steps before "spending" them?

If you've been using World Walking for a while, you'll notice that we've introduced a distance bank which you can add steps to before "spending" on a walk.

Many of our users use World Walking for motivation, logging their steps and seeing how this relates via process and milestones on our virtual walks. Previously, users had to manually add their steps directly to an active solo or group walk. Since many users are tracking multiple walks, including personal solo and group walks, this resulted in confusion and duplication of distance on our system. 

We want our users to benefit from the unique features of World Walking, without having to manually log all distances on a day-to-day basis. Our new bank feature allows you to build up distance over a period of time, for example a week, and then log or "spend" any amount of this distance on your walks. You might decide to spend half on your solo Paris route, and half on your group's Canadian Cities route, or spend the whole bank on your current walk.

You can now bank steps on your World Walking account by:

  • Manually entering them using the "Bank steps" button on the website or mobile app
  • Connecting your iOS app to Healthkit (on the settings screen) to automatically bank your distance regularly
  • Connecting World Walking to your Fitbit (on the settings page on the website or app)
  • Using our built-in GPS tracker on our iOS or Android apps.

Once you've built up a bank of distance, you can spend this on any active (non complete) solo or group walk.

We understand that our new website marks a change to the design and logging steps for our existing users, and we hope you enjoy and benefit from all our our changes on our free virtual walking platform.