You want to know how far you went. The usual path to that number is: install an app, create an account, accept a privacy policy, dismiss a subscription offer, and grant location access to a company you have now given your email to.
The phone already has a GPS receiver and the browser already has an API for it. Open a page, press start, run.
How to use it
- Open gpstrack.dev/trackme on your phone
- Pick run, ride or walk — this sets the units and the primary metric, not the recording
- Press Start and allow location access when the browser asks
- Wait for the first fix. "Searching" means the receiver has not locked yet; outdoors this is usually seconds, and under a roof it can be never
- Go. Distance, elapsed time and pace update as you move
- Press Stop for the summary: route map, splits, totals, and a GPX export
There is no step involving an account, and there is no install. You can add it to your home screen if you want a one-tap icon, but that is a bookmark rather than an app.
Nothing is uploaded
This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth being precise about.
watchPosition → IndexedDB → the map on screen. That is the entire loop. The
server has no role in it: no session is created, no point is transmitted, and if
you put the phone in flight mode after the page has loaded, everything still
works exactly the same.
Your run is on your phone, in your browser's storage. Clear the browser's site data and it is gone — that is the honest trade for not having an account. Export the GPX if it matters to you.
What it measures
- Distance — filtered, not raw. This matters more than it sounds like it should and has its own article
- Elapsed and moving time, separately. Standing at a junction should not ruin your average pace, and it does not
- Pace for runs and walks (min/km), speed for rides (km/h) — with an average and a best
- Splits per kilometre or mile
- Elevation gain, smoothed and labelled approximate, because GPS altitude is the noisiest thing the receiver reports
The one real limitation, stated up front
The screen has to stay on. There is no background geolocation on the mobile
web: iOS Safari suspends watchPosition when the tab is backgrounded or the
screen locks, and Android Chrome throttles it hard. Installing to the home
screen does not change this.
So the page requests a screen wake lock while recording and tells you it has one. Keep the phone unlocked, expect the battery to drain faster than usual, and if the screen does go off, the missing stretch is reported as a gap rather than drawn across with a straight line.
This is a real limit of the platform rather than something to engineer around, and it has an article too — including pocket mode, which is how you carry the phone without your leg tapping the screen.
Getting a good recording
Wait for the fix before you start moving. The first position after a cold start can be tens of metres off, and starting mid-drift puts the first leg somewhere you never went. The readout tells you when it has a usable fix; give it those few seconds.
Outdoors, and give it sky. Under dense tree cover or between tall buildings the receiver reports poor accuracy, and fixes worse than 30 m are discarded rather than trusted — better a short gap than an invented detour.
Do not switch apps mid-run. See above. Pocket mode is the answer.
Charge first. GPS plus a lit screen is the heaviest thing a phone does short of gaming.
Export it into Strava or Garmin
Stop the recording and there is an Export GPX button. GPX is the format every training platform imports — Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot, RideWithGPS — with one track point per fix, carrying elevation and timestamps.
The export article walks through the upload on each platform, including the bit everyone gets stuck on.
When to use something else
Use a dedicated app if you need background recording for a multi-hour ultra, live segment competition, or a training-load model. That is what they are for and this does not pretend otherwise.
Use this when you want the number without the transaction — a one-off route, a walk you did not plan to record, a ride on a borrowed bike, or any situation where installing an account-gated app to measure four kilometres is out of proportion to the question.
And if the thing you want tracked is not the phone — a vehicle, a package, a device on a boat — that is the telematics dashboard instead.
Where to go next
- Why your run stops recording when the screen locks
- Why GPS distance disagrees with your watch
- Export your run to GPX for Strava or Garmin