Andrew Parlette
The beta needs drivers
Interstate Tracker for Android isn’t on Google Play yet. Google requires a round of testing before it will release a new app to the public, and that round needs drivers.
The loop the project exists for already works: record a drive, match the trace against real Interstate geometry, watch the map fill in with the miles you covered. What it hasn’t had is enough drives on roads I have never driven.
What testing involves
You drive as you normally would. Start a trip when you set off and stop it when you arrive. Matching happens on the phone, because the network is bundled inside the app. A mountain pass or a hundred miles without signal changes nothing about whether the drive counts.
What helps most is hearing about anything that looks wrong:
- a stretch credited to you that you didn’t drive
- a stretch you did drive that never filled in
- a frontage road counted as the Interstate running beside it
That last one is the one I most want to hear about, and the one most likely to be hiding somewhere I haven’t looked. Frontage roads sit within GPS error of the highway for miles at a time, and so do ramps and parallel surface streets.
The producer credit
Testers who take part get a producer credit on this site. You can leave a name when you sign up or decide later. A name is only published with your consent, and email addresses are never published.
Testing today also means testing an app with no account and no network permission: your trips are recorded on your phone and stay there. An account is what comes next, and the privacy policy is updated before any release that changes what the app does with your data.
Editor’s note, September 13, 2026: accounts shipped after this was written. Signing in is optional — without an account nothing leaves the phone, and with one each finished trip syncs so the web app sees it. The promise in the paragraph above was kept: the privacy policy describes what an account stores.