Driftlog
Everything below is checkable. Where the app falls short I have said so, because you would find out anyway and it is faster this way.
In one paragraph
Driftlog is an iPhone travel diary you never write in. You grant Always location once and leave the app closed. It uses iOS significant-location-change monitoring to record which countries, regions and cities you passed through, with dates, and fills in a world map. It also reads the GPS EXIF already in your photo library and reconstructs the trips you took before you installed it, so the map is not empty on day one. There is no account and no server. Free to download; one purchase of $6.99 unlocks everything, permanently.
Facts
| Name | Driftlog: Travel Map & Diary (Japanese: ずぼ旅) |
|---|---|
| Platform | iOS 17.0 or later, iPhone and iPad |
| Version | 1.3, released 19 August 2026 |
| Price | Free to download. One non-consumable in-app purchase, "Driftlog Premium", $6.99 US / ¥800 JP. No subscription, no ads. |
| Free tier | Fully unlocks one country; other countries appear as names only |
| App Store | apps.apple.com/app/id6785328399 |
| Developer | Aki Takashima, trading as Shiori Studio. Solo developer, Japanese, based in Alberta, Canada. |
| Contact | shiori.sutudio@gmail.com |
| Languages | English and Japanese |
| Android | A build exists. It is not published. |
How it actually works
- Significant-location-change monitoring at kilometre accuracy — a coarse, low-power signal iOS already computes. This is why the battery cost is small.
- It records places, not routes. It cannot show the road you drove, by design.
- Photo backfill reads GPS EXIF from the existing photo library to reconstruct pre-install trips.
- From 1 December the app shows a year summary — countries, regions, cities, days — as one shareable image.
- No account, no server, no analytics SDK. There are no third-party SDK dependencies in the project at all.
- The one outbound request is reverse geocoding: a coordinate goes out to be turned into a place name. We do not claim "nothing ever leaves your phone", because that would be false.
Numbers, measured
Over a measured 22-day window: 3,608 impressions → 1,662 product page views → 721 first downloads → 120 purchases (16.6%). 97.6% of revenue is Japan. App Store ratings: Japan 9 ratings averaging 3.9; United States 1 rating at 5.0.
Assets
Free to use in coverage. No permission needed, no approval process, no embargo.
Icon is 1024×1024. Screenshots are 1287×2796. Need something else — a device-frame render, a screen recording, or promo codes to try the paid tier? Email and you will get it the same day.
What it is not. Not a route recorder. Not a trip planner. No social feed, no web version, no Android release. It needs "Always" location permission, which is a real thing to ask of a reader, and if that is a dealbreaker the app cannot work for them. A comparison with the alternatives, including the ones that beat it, is at driftlog-app.pages.dev/compare/.