Yes, if you allow “Always” location. atlas. asks for “When In Use” first and then, each time you start a journey, for “Always” — that is what lets it keep finding places while the phone is locked in a cradle or your pocket. With “When In Use” only, stories stop arriving once the phone locks. Location is sampled on a cadence you control in Settings → Journey, so it is far lighter on the battery than turn-by-turn navigation, but a long drive with the screen on will still drain a phone — use a charger.

Use Plan a route before you leave. Enter your start and destination, review the story stops and the estimate, then let it build. atlas. writes every story and records its narration onto the device. On the road, open the trip and tap “Drive this route” — the prepared stories play as you reach each stop, with no connection at all. “Play all stories” listens straight through, like an album.

Stories can be written and read in English, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian and Arabic. The app’s own interface is in all five, and in Arabic it is laid out right to left. There are twelve narrator characters, each with its own manner, its own pacing and a voice of its own, and each of them reads whichever language you have chosen. Story length is short, medium or long, and you can set the speaking rate.

Yes. Plug in and atlas. appears with three tabs — Journey, Stories and Trips — plus a Now Playing screen with cover art, progress and a playback-speed control. The Trip Status widget also shows up on the CarPlay dashboard on iOS 26.

Connect Apple Music or Spotify in Settings and choose what a story does to it: lower the volume and talk over it, or pause it and resume afterwards. If you connect nothing, no music service is contacted at all — atlas. simply plays over whatever you are already listening to, following the usual iOS audio rules.

Trips, stories and audio live on your phone: delete a trip in the app to remove it, or delete the app to remove everything. Journeys you have driven are added to the public journal on their own once they have three stories or more, so a journey may be published without you having tapped anything — open it and choose Unpublish. That removes the page, its audio and its index entry from this site, and that journey is never published again by itself. What other people or search engines copied while it was up is beyond anyone’s reach. See the next question to stop it happening in the first place, and the Privacy Policy for exactly what is sent where.

Two controls, for two different questions. Just this one: the notice card that appears when your first journey starts has a second button, “Don’t publish this journey”, which keeps that drive out of the journal for good. None of them: Settings → Privacy & data → “Add journeys to the atlas” is on by default, and turning it off means nothing is published unless you ask for it. Either way, anything already published can be unpublished from its own page at any time. Journeys are signed with a pen name the app generates for you — never your real name unless you type one in — and the first and last kilometre of the route are removed before it is sent, so the published map does not show where you set out or where you stopped. That protects the two ends; the rest of the drive is published as it was recorded.

Yes, at a desk. Journey → “Plan a route”, type where you would set off from and where you would end up, and the app writes and narrates the stories for that route in advance — a “road edition” you can read and listen to without moving. Preparing it needs a connection; once prepared it plays with no signal at all. It does not save you the location permission, though: that is asked for during setup, and on a fresh install the app cannot be opened until it is granted. The one exception is a device where location is switched off by Screen Time or a management profile — iOS never shows the switch there, so setup lets you through and says so: planning, reading and settings all work, a live journey does not.