The Ryokōya Field Guide
Your first afternoon out, or your fiftieth city. Five RyokōMates will show you where everything lives, how it works, and what you can bring home. Pick a task, meet your guide, and take the long way when you’re ready.
For iPhone · iOS 26.2 or later · English · Updated for version 1.2.2.
Screens are from version 1.2.2, with sample trips and places. See what changed in 1.2.2 →
Start here · no itinerary required
You don’t need a City Pack, a subscription or a perfect plan. An ordinary walk is plenty. Ryokōya records an outing you start; it doesn’t start a travel diary just because you installed it.
Sign in with Apple. If asked, choose the name you’d like the app to use. Read the location introduction before answering iOS’s permission questions.
Open My Trips and tap Start Now. Prefer a name, an icon or a focus first? Choose New Trip. For screen-off recording, allow location While Using the App or Always, with Precise Location on. Motion & Fitness helps distinguish walking from riding and count your steps.
Walk as usual. Stay somewhere for about a minute and Ryokōya tries to name the stop. You can add a Moment, a note or a photo along the way. Signal and place information vary; a stop can need your help.
When you’re done, tap End → End Trip. Complete a Quick Review if one appears. Your summary, story and receipt are ready to explore; the trip’s places also gather in Favorites.
Step zero: get the app.Ryokōya is free to download for iPhone with iOS 26.2 or later, and your first afternoon needs no subscription.
Chapter 01 · My Trips
Hi, I’m Pon, Tokyo’s RyokōMate! This is where your walks turn into stories. Let me show you how it works.
Your guide · Pon, the shapeshifting tanuki
My Trips is your travel journal. Start a trip when you head out, and Ryokōya records your route, works out the places where you stop, and counts your steps. When you end it, the day becomes a story you can read again and share.
Tap Start Now to begin right away, or New Trip to give it a name, an icon and the kinds of places you care about first.
Keep your phone in your pocket. Ryokōya draws your route and counts your steps, even with the screen off. Stay somewhere for about a minute and it works out where you are.
Tap Moment to mark the spot you’re standing on. In the Trip Log, press and hold a stop to add a note, capture a photo or video, or mark it Visited or Passed By.
If Ryokōya picked the wrong place, open the stop and tap Fix, then choose the right one nearby. Fix searches around the original stop, so you choose a nearby place rather than adding a visit from across town.
Tap End, then End Trip. If a few stops need a quick look, a Quick Review comes first.
Your stats, the story of the day, the neighborhoods you walked, the map and a playful receipt. Share a trip card, or print the receipt and share that.
Finished trips are listed by month. Tap one to open it again, or press and hold it to delete it. Once you have two or more, Journeys can tell several trips as one story.
In a Journey, each city opens its own chapter and its RyokōMate joins the telling: a welcome, a word of the day, a neighborhood story or a postcard goodbye. At places it knows, its facts come from that city’s free starter pack and the packs you own. The Journey and its journal remain free.
Trip Receipts
Open a finished trip or Journey, find The Receipt and tap Print the receipt. Pin favorite lines, drop others or roll the dice for another mix. The share preview makes it ready for a story or a post. Receipts, their customization and sharing are free.
Receipts can include weather and nearby earthquakes from the USGS catalog. The USGS request sends a date window and magnitude floor, never your location; nearness is calculated on your iPhone. A catalog match does not establish that you personally felt a quake.
Trip books
A trip or Journey can become a book with its map, story and places. Each city gets a page from its RyokōMate, and every day prints the way the journal tells it. Preview it free, then use Pro to save or share its PDF. In-app hardcover ordering is not available.
Trips are saved in Ryokōya on this iPhone. With Ryokōya Pro, the iCloud Trip Vault also backs up every finished trip, photos included, and every Journey to your own iCloud, so a new iPhone can get them back. Restoring is always free.
Chapter 02 · Explore
Bonjour, I’m Gigi, Paris’s RyokōMate! Explore is the map I’d use to find a good café. Here’s how it works.
Your guide · Gigi, the little gargouille
Explore is a map for finding places to eat, drink, see and do, around you or anywhere in the world. Scout an area before you go, open any place to learn about it, and save what catches your eye. The map starts quiet: places appear when you tap Refresh Area.
Move and zoom the map, tap the arrow button to come back to where you are, or tap the magnifying glass to search for a place or a city. Picking a result flies the map there.
The pill at the bottom charts the places around the middle of the map. Tap it again to dig deeper.
The icons on the left switch kinds of places on and off: restaurants, bars, cafés, landmarks, museums, parks, shops, hotels, entertainment and other places. The clock button hides places that are closed right now.
Tap a pin to see its hours, how far it is on foot, its website, a street-level Look Around view where there is one, and your own photos and comments. Hours, a website and Look Around depend on available information.
Tap Save to add it to Favorites, Plan It to add it to a plan, or Share to make a card of it. During a trip, Tag adds it to the trip.
The Plans menu at the top right shows a plan’s numbered stops on the map. Choose None to go back to everything.
What you save from Explore lives in Favorites and Plan It. Clear Maps Cache in Settings empties Explore’s stored map data without touching your favorites.
Explore’s own search, filters and place tools are free. Related features such as unlimited active plans and Trip Radar have their own Pro access.
Chapter 03 · Plan It
Hey, I’m Coo, New York’s RyokōMate. I’ve seen everything twice, so I like a plan. Here’s how to make one.
Your guide · Coo, the rooftop pigeon
Plan It is where you sketch an outing before you go: the places you want to visit, in the order you want to visit them. When the day comes, Ryokōya walks you from one stop to the next.
Tap Create Your First Plan (later, Create a New Plan), give it a name and, if you like, the dates of your trip.
Open any place, in Explore, in Favorites or on a trip, tap Plan It and choose your plan, or create one there. Each place becomes a stop.
Drag stops to reorder them, or use a stop’s ••• menu to give it a day or remove it. With three or more stops, Ryokōya may offer to Optimize the order and save you some walking.
With dates set, you get a countdown, a reminder on the first morning, the weather once it’s in the forecast, and Check Opening Hours to flag stops that are closed on your dates. Dates don’t make bookings or guarantee that a venue will be open.
Ryokōya draws walking routes between stops and shows your next direction at the top. Tap Arrived at each stop (it also notices when you’re there), or Skip.
Far from your stops? Navigation lets you step through them with Next. Live walking guidance takes over once you’re there.
Plans are saved on this iPhone. With Ryokōya Pro, the iCloud Trip Vault backs them up to your own iCloud too.
Chapter 04 · Favorites
Olá, I’m Galo, Lisbon’s RyokōMate! I never forget a good place, and neither will you. Here’s how Favorites works.
Your guide · Galo, the folk-art rooster
Favorites keeps the places you love, or want to try, all in one spot. Save single places, sort them into collections of your own, and find a ready-made collection from every trip you finish.
Open any place, in Explore, on a trip or in a plan, and tap Save. Choose Favorites Only, or put it straight into a collection.
Tap Create a New Collection and give it a name, an icon, a color and, if you like, a description. Trip Radar on a collection is an optional Pro feature.
Every trip you end adds a collection of the places you visited, named after the trip.
The chips at the top show All, Plan It, Collections, Trips or Places. Places can narrow down to one kind, like cafés.
See its places, tap View on Map, edit it with the pencil, or delete it. Deleting a collection keeps its places in Favorites. A saved collection is not itself a recorded trip.
Favorites and collections are saved on this iPhone. With Ryokōya Pro, the iCloud Trip Vault backs them up to your own iCloud too.
Chapter 05 · Passport
Hello, I’m Kon, Kyoto’s RyokōMate. Your Passport keeps everything you earn on foot: stamps, crowns, and RyokōMates like me.
Your guide · Kon, the white kitsune
The Passport holds everything you earn on foot. Spend time in a neighborhood and its stamp is pressed into your Stamp Book. Visit the places in a City Pack and its RyokōMate, a city’s own character, comes to life, all the way to gold. Crowns, City Bingo and awards round it out.
Stop somewhere in a neighborhood, or wander it for a while, and its stamp is pressed. Just passing through, or riding through on a train, doesn’t count.
Each city has its own pages of stamps. Tap one to see when you first earned it, or to share it or the whole city page. In Progress keeps nearby or hand-picked cities close; Stamped and Visited holds the others.
Open City Packs. Every city has a free starter pack to add, and more packs to buy, each a hand-picked list of places. Across 51 cities there are 333 packs; paid packs and city bundles are separate from Pro.
Stop at a pack’s places on your trips. Its RyokōMate wakes up at your first visit, shows its full colors at halfway, and comes home in gold once you’ve been to them all.
Crowns reward whole areas: a city’s heart, a district, or a themed set of neighborhoods. They’re at the end of each city’s Stamp Book; tap one to see what’s left to walk.
City Bingo fills in from your trips, awards celebrate feats like a 20 km day or a night out past 11 PM, and On This Day brings back a trip from this date.
Turn it on and pack places can count even when no trip is running, when you stay at one for ten minutes or more.
Your Passport is saved on this iPhone. With Ryokōya Pro, the iCloud Trip Vault backs up your stamps, packs, pack progress and badges too. Packs you bought always come back with Restore Purchases in Settings.
More City Packs, one at a time or as a city bundle. They’re yours to keep, and they aren’t part of Pro.
Put it all together
Explore · Favorites · Plan It
My Trips · Journeys
Passport · Favorites
The practical bits
Ryokōya is designed for iPhone on iOS 26.2 or later and is currently in English. Sign in with Apple creates the local account. A trip needs location access; While Using the App or Always can keep a trip you started recording with the screen off. Turn on Precise Location so the app can distinguish nearby places. Motion & Fitness supports motion detection and steps.
Always permission is needed for optional Always Collecting between trips. That switch starts off and does not record a route. Photo-library access is separate: attach pictures yourself, or use Pro’s Find/automatic matching for photos from your trip window.
On iPhone Duo, Ryokōya stays in one window as you open, fold or close it, so the same trip keeps going. The app is still in English; on an iPhone set to Japanese, City Packs also recognize the Japanese names Apple Maps uses for their places.
The gear in My Trips, Plan It, Favorites or Passport opens Settings. Explore has no gear of its own. Settings holds preferences, permissions guidance, purchases, Trip Vault, map-cache clearing and diagnostic-log export. Clearing Maps Cache doesn’t remove your favorites. To reopen a tab’s built-in guide, tap its name at the top of the tab.
Deleting a Journey keeps its trips. Deleting a favorites collection keeps its saved places. Deleting a trip removes that trip and its iCloud backup; that is different from removing the app.
Settings → Delete Account erases the cloud backup first, then local app data. If the cloud copy cannot be reached, deletion stops. Export anything you want to keep before using it. Removing the app alone leaves an existing cloud backup in place.
Open Settings from a tab’s gear, then Trip Vault. With Pro and iCloud available, check that automatic backup is enabled and review its status. Finished trips back up as they end, and later edits follow when you leave the app; you do not need to tap Back Up Now for every change. Keep the old phone and your own exports until you have verified the restore.
On the new iPhone, use the same Apple account and iCloud account. Open Settings → Trip Vault → Restore from iCloud. Restoring is free, even without a current Pro purchase. It fills missing trips; it does not overwrite a local version of the same trip.
Settings → Restore Purchases asks Apple to restore paid access, including packs. It does not restore your recorded routes or rebuild your travel history. Trip Vault restore retrieves backed-up memories.
Useful from the first walk
Ryokōya
Ryokōya Pro
Pro is available monthly, yearly or as a one-time Lifetime purchase. The 30-day Trip Pass gives Pro access without automatic renewal. Paid City Packs and city bundles are separate one-time purchases; neither Pro nor Trip Pass includes them. See current prices for your region in the app.
To cancel an auto-renewing Pro subscription, use iOS Settings → your name → Subscriptions → Ryokōya. Canceling stops the next renewal and keeps access for the period already paid for. Apple handles purchase refunds.
Before the next detour
Still stuck, or have a good idea for the next outing? Support goes to the person who made Ryokōya.
For changes since launch, visit What’s new.
In Explore, move the map and tap Refresh Area. Search, locating yourself and choosing a plan are other ways to bring places into view. A quiet starting map is intentional.
Read Gigi’s Explore guide →A stop usually needs about a minute, and GPS and place listings can be imperfect. Confirm or Fix a guessed name; on a finished day use Add a Stop for something missed, or Not a Stop for an incorrect visit.
Set a stop right →Yes. Trip recording, routes and stories work beyond City Pack destinations. Curated packs and neighborhood stamp maps cover 51 cities. Place information, signal, weather, hours and Look Around availability vary; the app does not guarantee every feature offline.
Trip recording runs during a trip you start. Always Collecting is a separate, optional feature for nearby owned pack places, off by default. It uses geofences and a real stay rather than recording a route between trips.
Read Kon’s explanation →A recent interrupted trip can resume when the app relaunches within six hours. Older interruptions offer a restore decision. Background recording still depends on iOS, permissions and signal. If a recording problem repeats, Support explains how to check permissions and export a field log.
Your records live on your iPhone, with optional Pro backup in your own private iCloud. There is no Ryokōya server holding your travel history. Maps, weather and other documented service queries still contact their providers. Field logs can contain precise location history; review one before choosing to send it.
Read the privacy policy →Pon's keeping the dango warm.
For iPhone · Free to start
