A guide that plays itself.

A guide that plays itself. The audio lives on your phone, and each piece starts when you reach the place it is about. There is no group to meet, no guide to follow and no time to be anywhere. You buy it once and it is yours. Walk it today, walk it again in two years.

No. The price is the audio and the route, nothing else. Where a place charges to go in, you pay at the door, and every stop is written so it works from the street, so a closed museum never costs you part of the tour.

One phone runs the tour and two people share it happily with an earbud each. In the car it plays through the speakers, so everyone hears it. If you would rather have one each, a tour is on any phone signed into the same Tropi Guide account as the one that bought it.

Neither. There is no subscription. A tour you buy is a tour you keep, on any phone you sign into with the same account, for as long as the app exists.

English, and only English for now, with one voice all the way through. Every tour has three free samples in the app, and the site plays how they begin, so you can check the voice and the language before paying a cent. More languages are the thing we most want to add.

A guided walk costs 25 to 40 euros a person, starts when the guide says, and shares one voice between twenty people. Google tells you what a building is called. This tells you why it is there, in your ear, when you are standing in front of it. All that for the price of a couple of coffees, for everyone around one phone, whenever you like, and again next year.

Tropi Guide is on the iPhone today and Android is on its way. If one of you has an iPhone, one phone is all a tour needs. A tour bought now will be on your account on Android too.

If you are staying in Funchal and have a morning, take one of the walks. They start in the middle of town and need nothing but shoes. The drives take half a day or a whole one and need a car.

No. Download the tour over wifi before you leave, and it runs on GPS, which is free, works with no signal at all and does not touch your data. The map underneath may not draw without a connection, but your position, the route and every word of the audio still do.

Because the tour has to know you have arrived even when the phone is in your pocket and the screen is off. Allow it all the time and you can put the phone away and just walk. Allow it only while the app is open and the tour goes quiet the moment the screen locks.

Use it to know which stop you have reached. That is the whole job, and it happens on the phone. Your coordinates are never sent anywhere. What the app does record is which stop played and which did not, so we can fix the ones that fail.

On the walks, yes, and keep one ear free for traffic and the people around you. In the car, connect by Bluetooth or a cable and it comes out of the car speakers so everyone hears it.

GPS for a few hours does use a fair bit. The screen is the bigger drain, and you do not need it: lock the phone and the tour keeps going. Set off charged, and bring a power bank on the walks or a charger in the car.

Open the tour and tap the map: the flag is the start, and looking at the map does not begin anything. Once you press Begin, a line points from wherever you are to the first stop. You can also start anywhere you like: tap any stop in the list and it plays.

No. Each stop plays on its own when you get to it. There is nothing to watch for and nothing to time. Put the phone away and walk, or drive.

You have to be inside the circle around the stop, so take a few more steps towards it and give it a moment. If it still will not, tap the stop in the list and it plays straight away, and nothing is lost.

Tap it in the list. Any stop, at any moment, as many times as you like: ahead of you, behind you, or the one you were half-listening to when a car went past.

Yes. The tour remembers what you have heard. Leave it for an hour or for a week, come back, and it carries on from where you stopped instead of starting over.

Both, as long as location is allowed all the time. Take photographs, answer messages, look something up. The tour keeps running underneath and the next stop still plays when you reach it.

The audio pauses for the call and picks up afterwards, in the same place. Nothing is skipped.

Sign in with the same account you used before and they are in My Stuff. If they are not, Restore Purchases in the app asks the store you bought from, with the same store account you bought with.

Refunds for a tour bought in the app are the store’s to give, not ours: Apple’s at reportaproblem.apple.com. Tell us what went wrong as well. If something in the app failed you, we would rather fix it than read about it in a review.

Tell us: Report a Problem is in the app’s Support page. Say which tour, and roughly where. It was written by people who live here, and a wrong date or a shop that has closed is worth knowing about.