Mangata, an iOS walking app that treats every stroll as an exploration trip

The idea grew out of the developer's own walking habit in Hangzhou. The Qiantang River was covered section by section over many trips, extending as far as the Fuchun River, and Xianghu Lake was walked a dozen times or more, along with West Lake and the surrounding hills. Walking that much produced a plain thought: it would be better to have something to do while walking. In April, Color Walk posts — pick a color before going out, photograph only that color — began appearing in numbers on Xiaohongshu, and the developer suggested trying the format with a friend. That idea was combined with two earlier experiences: prompt cards that tell a walker to photograph, for example, windows of a certain shape or the traces of wind in grass, and a city treasure-hunting product the developer had used.

The first version did only Color Walk: start a walk, pick a color, take photographs, end the walk and share the images. The process was short and quick to build. Doing so raised a question, the developer wrote: Color Walk on Xiaohongshu is driven less by walking than by image sharing, and what users want is a picture good enough to post, wherever it was taken. The developer weighed for some time whether Mangata should centre on walking or on sharing, discussing the question with an AI, and settled on walking. Sharing, in that reasoning, sits closer to a crowded trend competing on templates, filters and update speed, and a product trying to serve both could slide into a tool for turning arbitrary photos into shareable cards. Mangata was therefore built without check-in tasks, calorie logging or walking challenges from its first release.

The market response was modest. The Color Walk trend faded quickly and Mangata attracted few users. The developer also had limited energy for promoting the app on social media, and found that photographs taken on walks were not always attractive enough to post; people willing to go out specifically for the sake of walking may be few to begin with. Walking apps, the developer noted, are a category many developers have tried, and some grew by rewarding steps with virtual coins, which helped make such apps popular. Discussions in overseas communities suggest that photographing colors along a route interests some people but not many, the developer wrote, while weight loss, step counts and calories are what push people to walk — many are simply moving from one destination to another.

A second feature, prompt cards, was added to give users a light reason to go out: find a shape that repeats, find evidence that wind has passed, or look only at the world within one meter. Cards can be swapped or ignored; they are not tasks. A walk is recorded through the photographs taken along the way. The developer also described a sky-color card that only takes shape after the walk: before departure it is nothing more than the weather, time and light outside, and the colors encountered on the route turn it into what the developer called a Rothko-style card.

The product's structure borrows the loop of extraction shooters — enter, play, extract — and divides a walk into four stages. Before the walk comes the reason to start, such as a color or a card, and that reason only needs to get someone out of the door. During the walk comes what is encountered: an image, a thought, or nothing at all. Then comes a summary of what the walk yielded, shown before any shareable image. Sharing comes last, when a commemorative card is exported from the record; the developer treats sharing as something that happens after extraction rather than as the entry point. Further modes, including walking companions and themed walks, are planned within the same four-stage structure.

Making the app changed how the developer works. Evening walks, started for testing and for exercise, became a working method: the developer uses the WeChat input method together with tools such as Cursor and Codex to continue vibe coding while walking, and describes many Mangata features and code fixes as having been completed on walks. The sspai account itself was drafted during a walk the day before publication, after the developer had been unable to start writing at a desk over the Mid-Autumn period; thoughts recorded by voice into Notion grew into a draft of more than 10,000 characters.

Mangata is currently available only on iOS. The developer's advice to anyone who wants to try it is to pick a color, without filling the album or posting anything: looking at what the walk left behind is enough.