Street Cred — Support

A game about covering the streets of New York.

Reporting something that looked wrong

The most useful reports name a street and what you expected. “I rode the whole of Bedford Ave and only half of it turned” is worth more than a screenshot, because it can be checked against the data.

The single most useful thing you can attach is the ride itself. Every ride is a file: Settings → Recorded rides, then swipe or long press to share it. It is a plain text recording of the location samples the app saw, which makes a problem replayable rather than guessable — the same file can be run back through the scoring offline.

It is also a record of where you have been, so it is never sent on its own. Nothing is uploaded by the app; you choose a ride, each time, and share it from your own phone.

Common questions

Does my location leave my phone?

No. The app has no server and no networking code of its own. It works out which streets you covered on the device, and the record stays there. The only way a ride goes anywhere is if you share the file yourself.

The base map under your streets is Apple Maps, which your phone loads from Apple the way it does for any app that shows an Apple map. That traffic is between your phone and Apple and never passes through us.

Why does it want “Always” location?

So it can notice a ride by itself, if you turn on “Start rides by themselves” in Settings. “While Using” works too — a ride you start with Record keeps recording with the phone in your pocket. What you give up is rides starting by themselves, and Settings says so.

I rode a street and it did not turn. Why?

A street counts when enough of it was covered, not when you touched it. Riding a third of a long avenue claims nothing, by design — otherwise crossing a street at a junction would claim it. If you rode the whole of something and it did not turn, that is worth reporting, and the ride file is what makes it findable.

Why is a block still not filled when I have done all four sides?

A block closes when every one of its bounding streets is covered, and plenty of New York blocks are not four-sided. Some can never close at all — a block with a highway or the water along one edge — and those are left out of the total rather than sitting there permanently unfinished.

My ride came out in the wrong mode.

Mode is worked out from the phone’s motion classifier rather than declared, so it is occasionally wrong. Without Motion & Fitness permission everything is recorded as one unattributed mode, which is the usual reason a ride has no colour.

Does it work without a signal?

Yes. The whole map ships inside the app and nothing is fetched, so it works underground, out of range, and in aeroplane mode. GPS itself still needs a view of the sky.