Support

01 Get in touch

SafeRoute is built and maintained by one person, so support runs over email — no chatbots, no ticket queue, no phone line. Messages go to me directly and I aim to reply within 48 hours.

To help me triage faster, please use a clear subject line:

• Bug report — something broke or behaved unexpectedly
• Feature request — something you'd like to see added
• Privacy request — data subject rights under UK GDPR
• General — anything else

02 Where SafeRoute works

SafeRoute adapts to wherever you are. In the United Kingdom, safety scoring is built on data.police.uk; in the United States and Canada, it uses each covered city's official open crime data; in Mexico City it uses the public prosecutor's (FGJ) open crime data. The app automatically picks the right source, emergency number (999 in the UK, 911 in the US, Canada and Mexico), and safe-place data for your location. The app is available in English and Spanish (Spanish on Spanish-language devices).

Safety scoring is available in every city listed below. The Live tab — recent 911 calls and live street cameras — is a separate, smaller list, because it depends on a city publishing a live feed rather than periodic crime reports.

United Kingdom

United States

US coverage is city-by-city — each city publishes its own crime data, so safety scoring is available within these cities:

Canada

Mexico

Outside a covered area (a UK region, or a covered US, Canadian, or Mexican city), routing and search may still work, but safety scoring won't be available. If you see 0 incidents loaded, the most common reasons are: you're outside a covered area (e.g. Scotland, or a city we don't yet cover), your device has no internet, or the upstream crime-data service is experiencing a temporary outage.

03 The Live tab

The Live tab is a dark 3D map of what has happened near you recently. It shows two different things, and they are deliberately kept separate from your safety score: nothing on the Live tab affects any score anywhere in the app. The safety index is built from police reports; the Live tab shows dispatch calls and camera imagery, which are a different kind of record and are not comparable.

The Live tab only appears where we have a feed for it. In every other covered city the rest of the app works normally — there is simply nothing live to show, and we would rather show nothing than imply a quiet night we cannot evidence.

911 calls police responded to

Glowing markers ("embers") are calls that police were dispatched to — not confirmed crimes. A call can turn out to be a misunderstanding, a duplicate, or nothing at all. We filter out call types that are not offences against a person or property, and we deliberately exclude categories where a marker would say more about who was reported than about what happened — mental-health and welfare calls, "suspicious person" reports, and calls about unhoused people are never shown.

Tap an ember for the call type and how long ago it was.

Not every city means tonight. Some police departments publish their dispatch log days in arrears, so those cities show a longer window under a heading that says so — THIS WEEK rather than TONIGHT. The window each city uses is listed below, and the card always states the period it is actually showing.

Live street cameras

Camera pins show the latest public view from a road authority's own traffic cameras. Images are fetched by our server, not by your phone, and no camera can be controlled from the app. These are the same public feeds the authorities publish themselves.

Camera coverage is uneven by design — these are traffic cameras, so they cluster on main roads and junctions rather than spreading evenly across residential streets.

Safety alerts

Alerts are optional and off until you turn them on. You can enable them from the Live tab or from About → Safety alerts. There are two kinds: a heads-up when you walk into a block where reported incidents run well above the local average, and — in cities with a live dispatch feed — an occasional check for serious 911 calls within a few blocks.

An alert names the street it fired on, says how unusual the area is, and shows a map of the block when you pull the notification down. Two actions are attached: open that area in the app, or go quiet until midnight.

Alerts need two things from iOS to work at all: notifications allowed for SafeRoute, and Location set to “Always” rather than “While Using”. Without both, iOS has no way to reach you when you walk into an area — the feature will look switched on and quietly do nothing. From version 1.3.4 the Nearby screen says so directly, naming whichever setting is blocking it and offering a button through to the right page of Settings. If you are on an earlier version, check Settings → SafeRoute yourself.

Since 1.3.4 the watched areas also follow you. They used to be pinned to wherever you last opened SafeRoute, so walking somewhere new meant walking past them; they now re-arm as you move, covering roughly 3 km around where the app was last open.

Choosing where to watch runs entirely on your phone, from crime data already cached there, and it makes no network request as you walk. Your location is never sent to our servers to produce an alert, and alerts fire on entering an area, so they cannot be triggered on demand from a standing start. When one does fire, the app asks iOS for the street name and a small map picture of that block so the notification can tell you where it means — those are Apple's own Maps services, the same ones any app uses to turn a coordinate into an address.

05 Troubleshooting

06 Reporting a bug

Bug reports are extraordinarily helpful — they're often the only way I find out something is broken. To make a report actionable, please include:

• Device model — Settings → General → About → Model Name
• iOS / watchOS version — Settings → General → About → Software Version
• SafeRoute version — visible at the bottom of the in-app info screen (tap ⓘ on the main planner)
• What you were doing when the issue happened
• What you expected versus what actually happened
• A screenshot or screen recording if you have one
• Approximate time of the issue (helps me check backend logs)

If your bug relates to share links, please include the link URL — those are anonymous and don't contain personal data.

07 Requesting a feature

Every feature request gets read. SafeRoute runs no in-app feedback prompts, and the anonymous usage analytics it does run only count which screens and features get opened — they carry no search text, no coordinates and no routes, and they cannot tell us why something is not working for you. Email is the only channel that can.

It helps to describe the problem you're trying to solve, not just the solution you have in mind — sometimes a small adjustment to an existing feature solves the same problem more cleanly than a brand-new one.

08 Privacy and your data

SafeRoute does not require an account, does not ask for your name or email, and runs no cross-app trackers and no advertising identifier. It does record anonymous, opt-out usage analytics, which carry a pseudonymous per-installation identifier and nothing that identifies you — you can switch them off under About → Anonymous analytics. For full detail on what we process and your rights under UK GDPR, see the privacy policy.

Read the privacy policy →

For data subject access requests, deletion requests, or anything else covered by UK GDPR, email with the subject Privacy request and we'll respond within one calendar month.

09 Service status

SafeRoute depends on a small number of upstream services. If routing or safety data breaks across the app for many users at once, the cause is almost always one of these:

If you experience a sudden, widespread issue, checking these status pages first can save you from waiting on a reply. If a disruption lasts more than an hour, I'll post an update here.