Apps that pay you to walk: what they actually pay, and what a walk is actually worth

There is a phone in your pocket right now that knows how many steps you took today, and there are at least six companies that would like to pay you for the number.

Not much. Let's get that out of the way, because the first thing anyone wants to know about apps that pay you to walk is whether they pay, and the honest answer is yes, and the second honest answer is that you should not quit anything. WeWard, the biggest of them, with something like thirty million users across twenty-nine countries, hands out its in-app currency at five fixed daily milestones: one Ward at 2,500 steps, three at 5,000, eight at 10,000, thirteen at 15,000, twenty-three at 20,000. You have to open the app and tap to convert before midnight, or the day's steps go to wherever unconverted steps go. Wards cash out through PayPal or Venmo in the United States, after a fourteen-day wait on a new account, at a rate the company's own terms say is not fixed. Sweatcoin pays coins you spend in its marketplace. CashWalk pays coins that become gift cards, and shows you ads on your lock screen while it counts.

None of this is a scam. All of it is a business, and the business is this: your attention, for the ads, and your steps, as the reason you keep coming back for the ads. Which is fine. Television worked the same way for seventy years and nobody called it a scam. Just know what you're trading.

Here is the thing I keep snagging on, though. Every one of these apps is built on the idea that a walk is a quantity. So many steps, so many coins. And a walk is not a quantity. A walk is a direction.

I grew up in Boise, and the walks I remember are not the ones that were long. They are the ones that went somewhere. Nobody counts the steps to a place they want to be. You count steps on a treadmill, which is a machine for walking nowhere, and you count them on a phone, which is a machine for the same thing with better lighting.

So when we built trouvé we made a decision that looks small and isn't: we don't count steps. We count places. A reward gets placed at a real spot on the map, a bakery, a flower shop, a Saturday market by the river, and the only way to earn it is to go there and be standing in range when you claim it. We call this drop hunting, because that's what it is. A drop is somewhere. You hunt it. If you have ever gone geocaching you already know the feeling; the difference is what's inside.

And what's inside is the second decision. The step-counting apps pay you in a currency that converts, eventually, to something from a national brand. trouvé pays you, where we have partners, in the thing itself: a quarter-pound cookie from the bakery you walked to, a plant from the plant shop, a jar of honey from a tool library that keeps bees. The business you walked into is the one that put it on the map, and the only time the cookie leaves the counter is when you are standing there to take it. Everywhere else, you earn Zapp, our points, and Zapp gets you a chance at gift cards through sweepstakes. A chance, not a guarantee. We'd rather say that plainly than have you find out.

There is a study I think about more than a person probably should. A research firm called PromoWorks looked at what happens when a grocery store hands out samples, and found that the sampled product's sales jumped 177 percent that day and were still up 57 percent twenty weeks later. Twenty weeks. The point of the sample was never the sample. It was the person standing in the aisle with the thing in their hand, deciding something.

That's what a walk is for, I think. Not the number. The deciding. You walk somewhere, you arrive, something happens that could not have happened on the couch. The step apps will pay you for the walking, and they will pay you a little, and that is a perfectly reasonable thing to accept. We'd just rather pay you for the arriving.

Go find something.