Ever Yours

Two trails are free forever: the Laugavegur in Iceland and the Kumano Kodo in Japan. Start walking and the first postcard arrives within a few thousand steps.

Your phone already counts your steps. Ever Yours turns them into a journey.

Choose a great walk and a companion to walk it with. Every step you take, they take. When they reach somewhere worth stopping, a postcard arrives: a photograph of the real place, and a few lines in their own voice about what it was like to get there.

You do not have to do anything else. There is no streak to keep, no daily goal, and nothing to lose by having a quiet week. Walk as much or as little as you like. The road waits.

SIX REAL TRAILS, MAPPED FROM THE REAL ROUTES

• Laugavegur, Iceland — rhyolite hills, black sand and glacier rivers, from the hot springs to the birch wood. Free. • Kumano Kodo, Japan — a thousand-year-old pilgrim road over forested mountains to three great shrines. Free. • West Highland Way, Scotland — lowland oak woods to the moor and the mountain, from the edge of Glasgow to Fort William. • Besseggen, Norway — a single day along a knife-edge between two lakes of different colours. • Tour du Mont Blanc — a full circle around the highest mountain in the Alps, through three countries and three languages. • Camino Frances — across the top of Spain to Santiago, the most walked road in Europe, with sixty-six places to stop.

More are being made: Hadrian's Wall Path in England, the Alta Via 1 through the Dolomites, and the Fishermen's Trail on the Portuguese coast.

WALK WITH YOUR OWN ANIMAL

Pip the fox and Sable the wolf are ready to go. Or use a photograph of your own dog, your cat, or whoever else shares the house. The app finds them in the picture and cuts them out, and a short clip is enough to learn how they walk. All of that happens on your phone.

AN ALBUM THAT FILLS UP

Every postcard is kept. Each one is a real photograph of a real place, with the date you arrived and the steps it took to get there. The passport records the trails you have finished. Nothing expires, and nothing is ever taken away from you.

NOTHING LEAVES YOUR PHONE

No account. No server. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no crash reporting. The app reads your step count from Apple Health and never writes anything back to it. Photographs of your animal are processed on the device and are never uploaded. Delete the app and all of it is gone, because there was never a copy anywhere else.

Ever Yours works with no internet connection at all.

WHAT IT COSTS

Two trails are free, permanently, with no account and no time limit. To open the rest — and everything added later — there is a monthly or a yearly plan, or a single payment if you would rather never think about it again. Family Sharing works with all three.