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Two ways. You can tap a country on the globe and mark it yourself, which works with no permissions at all. Or you can turn on auto check-in, which watches for border crossings in the background and fills the map in as you travel.

No. Your whole map works on this phone without one. An account gives you an @username so friends can find you, and lets your map follow you to a new phone. It is optional, and you can delete it in Settings at any time.

Transport comes from the distance and how you are travelling, with flights tapering because a long haul costs far less per kilometre than a short hop. Beds and daily spend come from the number of nights, scaled by each country’s general price level — the ratio of its GDP per capita at market rates to the same figure at purchasing power parity, from the World Bank. It is an estimate for comparing options and nothing more; do not book against it.

They are the US State Department’s travel advisory levels. 1 is normal precautions, 2 exercise increased caution, 3 reconsider travel, 4 do not travel. A country with no published advisory shows as unrated rather than as safe.

Earthquakes from the USGS; storms, floods, volcanoes and wildfires from GDACS; and armed conflict, unrest and terrorism from the US State Department and Global Affairs Canada travel advisories. All fetched live when you open the app. These are the feeds emergency services and diplomats watch, not a news aggregator, and every warning quotes its source and links to it.

The dates are the ones historians use for a transfer of sovereignty — a treaty, an annexation, an independence day — and each is checkable. What it does NOT do is redraw borders: Ochre paints modern country shapes, so 1800 Germany appears as today’s Germany rather than as three hundred separate states. Real historical border geometry is licensed data that would mean either paying for it or open-sourcing this app. Anything left unshaded is not claimed by the dataset for that year, which is not the same as known to be unruled — coverage is the major powers from 1500 onward.

Solid fill means direct rule. Hatched fill means partial or indirect control — a protectorate, a client state, a brief occupation. Some claims are listed in the text but never painted at all, because painting them would be a bigger lie than leaving them out.

Yes. Countries, borders, cities, facts, guides, histories and flags are all bundled in the app — including everything the deep-zoom map draws. Only live warnings, the ISS position and guide photographs need a connection.

Because it is one, and it runs out. The surface imagery is about 9.8 km per pixel, so past a certain zoom you would just be magnifying blur. Instead the imagery fades to shading and the coastlines, borders and cities are drawn as lines and points, which are exact at any zoom. You end up seeing more detail, not a bigger smudge.

Places hidden on the globe with nothing marking them — the remotest point in the ocean, the highest and deepest points on Earth, and one thing that is not on Earth at all. Tap where you think one is; if you are close enough it opens. Stats → Achievements → All → Discoveries lists what you have found and hints at the rest without giving away where they are.

No. Photos, notes, trip dates and locations never leave the device. There is no code in Ochre that uploads them.

Only from a backup file you saved. Without a server there is nothing to restore from, so it is worth saving one after any big trip. A backup carries every profile on the phone, not just the one you were using.