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 English, Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian. There are twelve narrator characters with their own manner and pacing; behind them are two multilingual voices, so every narrator 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. If you published a trip, open it and choose Unpublish — that removes the page, its audio and its index entry from this site. Before publishing, check the byline in Settings and consider that a published route shows where you started and finished. You can also turn on “Hide coordinates from story engine”. The Privacy Policy spells out exactly what is sent where.

Yes — a full demo trip from Córdoba to Valencia ships inside the app, with its stories already narrated in four languages. It needs no signal and no location permission, so you can hear what a drive sounds like before you take one.