quick answers
Frequently asked questions.
Short answers to the questions we get most. When an answer has a longer story behind it, the link goes to the engineering deep dive.
- Do I need an account?
- No. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to log into. Your saved trips, moods, and settings live on your device, not on our servers.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes — and that is the everyday path. Download your area once (addresses + offline routing), then route planning and street search run on your phone. The map image still needs a connection. Until you download, Try it now uses the shared planner, including place search over the network. It is the same routing code the public instance runs, compiled for your device.
- What data do you collect about me?
- None that we can help. The public routing server is stateless and configured to log nothing, with no accounts and no request history. Trips you save stay on your device. The deeper answer, including the parts enforced in code rather than by policy, is in Private by architecture.
- Where does the map data come from?
- From OpenStreetMap, the free volunteer-built map of the world, plus public elevation data. We process it ourselves into the scored road graph the router uses. The whole pipeline is described in the bake, and the freshness of what is currently live is public on the build report.
- What areas are covered?
- The contiguous United States plus Hawaii. Routes work across state lines within that area; one-shot plans are capped at about a long day's drive. The build report shows exactly what is on the public mirror right now.
- Why doesn't it know about traffic?
- Because a live-traffic query tells the provider where you are and when, and we decided that trade was not ours to make for you. Instead there is an optional field where you type the ETA your usual maps app is already showing; the time budget anchors to it. The reasoning is in the architecture article.
- Why is my route different from Google's?
- Partly on purpose: astray optimizes for the best drive inside your time budget rather than the quickest arrival, and a different objective gives a different route. Partly as a side effect: without live traffic, our travel times assume free-flowing roads, so our "fastest" can differ from a traffic-aware one. How a time budget becomes a route has the full story.
- Can it plan a drive that ends back at home?
- Yes. Set the start and end to the same place and it plans a loop: you say how long the tour should be, and it goes out on one road and back on another. Loops are genuinely harder than regular trips; the loop problem explains why.
- What exactly is a "mood"?
- A named set of preferences (more coastline, fewer stoplights, nothing you have driven recently) that the router turns into arithmetic. You can use the shipped ones (Balanced, Coast & water, Peaks & passes, Back roads, Cruise, Gentle), tweak them, or build your own with the equalizer.
- Why did my scenic route include a boring stretch?
- Usually because that stretch was the connector: an unavoidable bridge or valley crossing costs its travel time and nothing more, so the router crosses it quickly and spends your budget where the map offers something better. And on some corridors there is genuinely no worthwhile detour, in which case the engine returns a smaller one rather than inventing a pointless drive. See the routing engine.
- Why is the shared planner slower than my phone?
- Both rungs run the same engine. The public instance is a small courtesy box so you can try Astray without a download — a plan can wait in line or just take longer. After you download your area, planning runs on the device and does not wait on us. That is also the private path: trip details stay on the phone. Private by architecture has the longer story.
- When should I use the shared planner instead of downloading?
- For a first look; when you are traveling a state you have not cached yet; when you are on light or metered data (the download is a couple hundred megabytes); or on an older or low-memory phone that struggles with a large local engine. Everyday driving is faster and more private on your phone.
- I planned a trip and it felt broken, empty, or just slow. What did I do wrong?
- Often nothing. Coverage is the contiguous United States plus Hawaii — outside that, search and routing say so honestly. Astray does not know live traffic, closures, or whether a back road is open today. If you skipped the download you are on the shared planner, which can feel slow. And the map picture still needs a network even when routing is already offline — see why the map still needs a connection.
- I downloaded my area — why does the map still need a connection?
- Downloading caches street addresses and the road graph the router uses. The map you look at is a different pipe: as you pan and zoom, the app still loads display tiles from a map service. Routing can already be offline while the picture still needs a network. That is not a trip diary on our side; it is how any web map works.
- What happens to my saved trips if I clear my browser data?
- They are gone. That is the honest cost of keeping everything on your device instead of on our servers. The app includes a backup export so you can save your trips and moods to a file first and restore them later.
Curious past the short answers? Start with the engineering story, a few minutes of reading with deep dives into every corner.