Unified cities and merging old walks

CityWalker now supports several major cities, including Praha, Oslo, and Paris as unified cities. The city is split into regions you still download individually. But they all belong to one city, so your coverage is tracked accurately across the whole city and walks that cross between regions just work.

If you used CityWalker before these cities were available as unified downloads, you may have some walks recorded under the old separate districts. This article explains what that means and how to bring everything together.

What changed and why

In earlier versions of the app, large cities like Praha weren't available as a single city. Walkers who wanted to track coverage in Praha had to add the individual districts eg. Praha 2, Praha 7, and so on as separate cities.

This caused two problems:

• Walks that crossed district boundaries were stuck on Coverage calculating… indefinitely, because the street data for the next district wasn't loaded.
• Coverage stats were split across multiple cities, making it impossible to see your true total progress across the whole city.

Unified cities fix both of these. The districts become regions of one city. You still download them individually, but walks are tracked across the full area seamlessly and your coverage is shown in one place.

The banner in the app

If CityWalker detects that you have walks recorded in old regions, it shows a banner on the Stats screen. There are two stages:

Stage 1 - Download available

If a unified city is now available for a place where you have old walks, the banner tells you it's ready to download. Tap Go to Settings to add it from the Your Cities section.

Stage 2 - Merge walks

Once you've downloaded the unified city, the banner changes to show how many walks were found in the old regions. Tap Merge now to move them all into the unified city.

The merge is safe. No walks are ever deleted. Your walk routes, distances, and dates are all preserved. Coverage is recalculated against the full city's street data automatically afterwards, and the empty old regions are tidied up for you.

What happens to the old regions

When you merge, CityWalker automatically removes the old district regions once their walks have moved across. You don't need to clean anything up, the merge handles it.

This matters because CityWalker uses your GPS location to work out which city a new walk belongs to. If an old district row were left behind, the GPS detector could attach a future walk to Frogner instead of Oslo, or to Praha 2 instead of Praha. Splitting your walks across old regions again. Removing the empty region after the merge prevents that.

Deleting an old city manually

You normally won't need this as merging cleans up for you. But if you ever want to remove a downloaded city yourself:

1. 1
   Open Settings and find the Your Cities section.
2. 2
   Tap the old district city (e.g. Praha 2 or Frogner).
3. 3
   Tap Delete city. The city's street data is removed from your device. Your walks are not deleted.
4. 4
   Repeat for any other old district cities in the same area.

Which cities are available as unified downloads?

The current list includes Praha, Oslo, Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Chicago, and more. The list grows with each app update. Unified cities are bundled into the app and also updated in the background, so you'll get new cities automatically without needing to update.

If a city you walk in isn't available as a unified download yet, it works exactly as before. You can add it by name from Settings. Unified cities are added for the places where walkers most often ran into the district-boundary problem.