The problem
Live flight tracking trended expensive and quietly tracker-heavy. Flighty, FlightRadar24 Gold, FlightAware Premium — the good ones all landed somewhere between $50 and $100 a year, and most of them shipped with the third-party tracker stack the rest of the App Store had given up on resisting. The cheaper apps papered the screen with ads and missed half the data anyone actually needed. There wasn’t a credible alternative in between.
The reason live tracking costs money is that the underlying data does. The authoritative feeds — FlightAware AeroAPI is the one most premium apps use — are metered per call. Anyone serving live tracking either passes that cost on at premium prices or quietly compromises the data. Most apps pick one.
Why we built it
We wanted a tool we’d use ourselves without paying competitor prices. We fly enough to want lock-screen updates and a permanent log of every trip, but not enough to feel okay paying $99 a year for it.
The hypothesis was that with tight cost discipline on the data side and a freemium model that worked for both occasional and frequent flyers, we could land in the gap nobody was filling. The travelers most underserved by the existing market — the ones who fly a few times a year, often in regions where premium trackers are priced for US incomes and not local ones — were exactly the ones who’d value live gate changes the most.
How it works
The product is Flutter on the surface. Same screens, same logic, both platforms. Native code shows up only where Flutter genuinely can’t: iOS Live Activities and Dynamic Island, and a live notification on Android — a pattern we were preparing for before Android’s own framework reached GA. Everything else is shared between the two platforms.
The backend runs on Google Cloud. It keeps an index of flights in sync with the same authoritative data source the premium trackers use, refreshing on a tight schedule and pushing changes out within minutes of when a status actually moves. The trip log works offline and syncs when you reconnect, so a gate change never gets lost because you were on a tarmac with no signal.
- Live activities on both platforms
- Native iOS Live Activity with Dynamic Island and a live notification on Android. Same flight, same gates, same ETA, surfaced on the lock screen on both sides with full parity of behavior. We were preparing for the Android live-notification pattern before the platform’s own framework reached GA.
- Near real-time flight data
- Authoritative live tracking — registration, gate, terminal, baggage carousel, delay minutes, ETA — sourced from the same feed the premium trackers use. Refreshed on a tight schedule and pushed to the app within minutes of a status change.
- A price that doesn’t sting
- Freemium with a weekly trial and an annual plan, priced well under the $50 to $100 a year the premium trackers anchor on. Possible because we treat the flight-data spend as a first-class cost line, not an afterthought.
- Privacy from day one
- No third-party advertising SDKs or behavioral data brokers, ever. No Facebook SDK, no Google Analytics, no AppsFlyer. We run anonymous product analytics only, with no personal identifiers. If we ever turn on paid install attribution it will go through Apple’s privacy-safe SKAdNetwork — aggregate, no IDFA, no user-level data. You can use Wayflight without an email or an account.
- One Flutter codebase, native where it matters
- Flutter for the surface, for parity and velocity. Native code only appears in the places Flutter can’t actually reach: Live Activities and Dynamic Island on iOS, the live notification on Android.
- A trip log that stays on your device
- As of April 2026 the trip log is local-first by default. Your device is the source of truth. Group flights into trips with cover photos and notes, keep them private or share them, sync when you reconnect.
- Push alerts that earn the notification
- Gate changes, delays, boarding. Pushed only when they actually shift, not as a daily “your flight is in 3 days” tax on the lock screen.
Privacy from day one
Wayflight has never shipped a third-party advertising SDK or behavioral data broker. No Facebook SDK, no Google Analytics, no AppsFlyer, no Branch. Ever. You can use the app without an email or an account.
The line we draw is between measuring how the product works and tracking you across the App Store. We do collect anonymous product analytics — feature use, funnel completion, no personal identifiers — because any team needs that signal to ship well. What we don’t do is layer on the SDKs that quietly profile users across apps to sell ads. Those never made it into the project.
If we ever turn on paid install attribution, it’ll go through Apple’s privacy-safe SKAdNetwork — aggregate, no IDFA, no user-level identifier — which is the framework Apple built for exactly this purpose. We don’t have it wired up today, and we don’t have a third-party install-attribution SDK either.
That stance shaped the architecture, not the other way around. Each release has held a little less of your data, not more. The April 2026 build moved the trip log to local-first by default — your device is the source of truth, and our servers carry the index of public flight data, not the personal record of where you’ve been.
The trade-off is honest: anonymous, local-only data needs to be exported by the user if you change phones, and we surface that as Manage Account Data in the Profile tab. We’d rather make the responsibility visible than quietly hold the data on the user’s behalf.
Where it landed
Wayflight has 10K+ downloads and a review pattern that points back at the original brief: great for tracking, great for logging, no ads. The fastest-growing pocket has been frequent flyers in regions where the premium trackers are priced for US incomes, not local ones — exactly the audience we built the alternative for.
What’s next
Better itinerary import — forward your booking email and get a parsed trip back. More carriers in the search index. A web companion for the desktop side of trip planning, which is where most flights still get booked.