A self-guided walking tour is a way to explore a city, neighborhood, or landmark on your own schedule, using narration instead of a human guide to tell you what you're looking at and why it matters. You walk at your own pace, stop wherever you want, and skip whatever doesn't interest you, something a scheduled group tour with a live guide doesn't really allow.
Most self-guided tours fall into one of three formats:
Fixed audio guides. A pre-recorded track tied to numbered stops, often rented as a physical device or downloaded as an app at a specific landmark. You start each segment manually when you reach the matching number.
GPS-triggered apps. The app tracks your location and plays narration automatically as you approach each point of interest, no numbers, no manual starting. This format works well outdoors but struggles indoors, where GPS signal is unreliable.
Manual tap-to-advance tours. Common for museums and indoor spaces, you move through exhibits or stops at your own pace and tap "next" yourself, since GPS can't reliably tell which gallery or room you're standing in.
The honest answer is that it depends on what you're looking for. A good self-guided tour should give you accurate information (not generic trivia you could find in any guidebook), work reliably in the format that matches where you're using it (GPS outdoors, manual indoors), and respect that you might want to go off-script, skip ahead, or linger somewhere the "official" route doesn't stop.
Backyard uses the GPS-triggered format outdoors, automatically narrating real, fact-checked history and hidden stories about the exact block you're standing on as you walk, with five different narration moods depending on whether you want straightforward history, dark history, or something more irreverent. For indoor spaces like museums, it switches to a manual tap-to-advance format for the same reason any museum tour does, GPS doesn't work reliably indoors.
Unlike a fixed-route audio guide, there's no predetermined path, the narration triggers based on wherever you actually are, so exploring your own neighborhood works exactly the same way as exploring a city you've never visited.
See how Backyard compares to other walking tour apps, read about the real history behind one famous New York sidewalk, or download it free on the App Store.