Who's at the park? Post when you are heading down, see who else is going, and let your dog build a list of mates it actually gets on with. Every screen below is the real app, following one owner, Alex, and his dog Jimbo through a morning at the park.
Muttmates runs in the browser. There is nothing to install from an app store.
Open the site on your phone and you land here. Two ways in:
Not sure yet? You do not have to commit to anything to see what is going on at a park.
Any park page works without an account. If a mate texts you a Muttmates link, or you find a park through search, you can open it and read what is on there today: who is live at the park right now, and the plans people have posted.
The only things behind the sign-in are the things that need to know who you are, like posting a plan, saying you are coming to one, and joining a pack.
So the honest way to try Muttmates is to look up your own park first and see whether your regulars are already on it.
Tap Get started and this is the whole form.
Coming back later, you have three ways in, and none of them involve remembering anything you do not want to.
The usual. Type both, tap the button, done.
Don't want a password at all? Tap Email me a link instead. We send a link, you tap it on this phone, and you are in. The link works once and lasts fifteen minutes.
Tap Forgot your password, give it your email, and a reset link arrives. It works once and lasts an hour. The link opens the screen on the left where you pick a new password, and every other device gets signed out at the same time, in case the reason you are resetting is that a phone went missing.
Three short steps, and the dots up the top show you where you are. Here Alex is signing Jimbo up.
| Photo | Optional. Tap the circle to pick one from your phone. You can add it later from the profile. |
|---|---|
| Name | The only thing that is required. |
| Size | Small, medium or large. Other owners see this before they turn up, which is the whole point. |
| Age | Puppy, adult or senior. |
| Your first name | So people at the park know who to say hello to. |
Got more than one dog? The app carries as many as you like. A row of name chips appears at the top of your profile and you tap whichever one you are out with, and that is the dog that goes on your plans.
Pick up to three from ball obsessed, chaser, sniffer, gentle, rough and tumble, shy at first, good with puppies, and good with small dogs. Jimbo is ball obsessed and a chaser, so that is what other owners will read.
Three is the cap on purpose. A dog described eight ways is described no ways, and this line is what another owner reads when they are deciding whether to bring theirs down.
You can change it any time from the profile screen.
Type a suburb or a park name, or tap Find the closest to me and the phone will sort it out.
Your home park is the one you hear about by default. You can follow more later, and you can change which one is home whenever you like.
This is the screen you will actually use. Top to bottom:
The bar along the bottom is Home, Places, the post button, Packs and Profile.
Tap the round button in the centre of the tab bar and this slides up.
| Park | Defaults to the one you are looking at. |
|---|---|
| When | Now, or one of the next few round times, or Pick a time for anything else. |
| For about | 30 minutes, 45 minutes or an hour. It is a rough guide, not a commitment. |
| Post to | Everyone at the park, one of your packs, or mates only. |
| Anything to add | Optional. Things like "bringing the chuck-it, far gate". |
If other dogs are already heading down around that time, the app tells you before you post, so you can just join theirs instead.
And if you tap post before you follow any park at all, the app does not argue, it just offers to find you one. That is the second screen.
Tap any plan to open it. You get the park, the time, how long, and who it is visible to. This one is Jimbo's afternoon plan, and three dogs have already joined.
Jimbo did a quick morning lap before work, and now the plan is over a card sits on it asking how it went with each dog he met. Three answers:
This is where the mates list actually comes from. There are no friend requests anywhere in the app. Two owners walk home, both say it went great, and their dogs are mates.
The Places tab is dog parks, dog beaches, and any other place where dogs can meet and greet, closest first. That is 1,070 off-leash parks and 59 beaches around the country, plus any meeting spots your groups have made.
It is also where the travelling crew finds a bed. The Caravan parks & camping chip adds dog-friendly places to stay: the caravan parks, plus about 640 free camps and 2,650 highway rest areas across every state. Each one wears its own Free camp or Rest area badge in the list, so you can tell a free overnight from a paid park, and a park from a toilet stop, before you tap. We have kept national park campgrounds out on purpose, because dogs are banned in national parks.
Following a place means its plans turn up in your feed and you can be pinged about it. Beaches work like parks: 20 of the 51 are true off-leash, and the rest tell you that leads and hours vary, because on most beaches they do.
Every park has an info page. Tap the park name on its feed, or the arrow on any search result, and you get the full picture before you get in the car.
The facilities come from OpenStreetMap, the same community-maintained data as the parks themselves.
Share this park on the info page opens this sheet, and it is how a park actually gets going. Muttmates only works when the regulars at your park know about it, so the share button is doing the heavy lifting.
The link opens the park's live feed, and as covered back in section 2, whoever taps it can read the park without an account. They only sign up once they can see it is worth it.
Map data is only as good as the people who update it, and plenty of parks have a toilet block or a tap that never made it onto the map. So the info page has a button for the people who would know: Been there? Tell us what it has.
Suggestions are checked before they go live, so the facilities list stays something you can trust when you are deciding whether to drive twenty minutes.
A pack is a private group, for your Wednesday regulars or the small-dog crew. Only members can see it and its plans. Alex runs one called Ashgrove early birds.
Tap Start a pack, say what it is, name it, optionally pin it to a place, and choose whether anyone with the code can join or you approve each one.
The What is it chips at the top let you call it a pack or a walking group. It is the same thing underneath, the label just says what you do, and walking routes are coming for the groups that want them. The Meets at row lists your places, and if your group meets somewhere that is not a park at all, + New meeting spot makes one on the spot. More on that in section 18.
Type the code the admin gave you and tap Look up. Codes get passed around in a group chat, a text, or at the park itself. The look-up shows you what you are joining first, the pack's name, how many dogs, and which park it meets at, so a mistyped code never lands you somewhere strange. Then Join with your dog, and depending on how the pack is set up you are either straight in or you wait for an admin to wave you through.
A pack has two tabs.
Plans posted to this pack only, with who is going. The round button in the bottom corner posts a new one straight to the pack, so you do not have to pick the audience yourself. Nobody outside the pack sees it.
Not every group meets at a listed dog park. Some meet at the back corner of an oval, a car park by the trail head, or a patch of grass that has never had a name. A meeting spot gives that place a page of its own.
While starting a pack or a walking group, tap + New meeting spot, name it, and the app pins it where you are standing. So make one when you are actually there, and the pin lands exactly where the group meets. Here Alex is starting the Sunday striders at a spot called Oval gate, top car park.
A new spot is private: only you and the members of packs that meet there can see it exists. Anyone else gets nothing, not even a hint it is there. If the spot turns out to be worth sharing, the Make it public for all to see button on its page opens it up to everyone, and that is the creator's call alone.
Once it exists, a spot works like any other place. It shows up under Your places with a spot tag, you can post plans at it, get directions to it, and share it, though a private spot's link only works for people who can already see it.
Three counters across the top: mates, park visits, and the week streak, meaning how many weeks in a row you have been down there. Jimbo has one mate already, Pepper, from this morning's lap.
Tap any dog anywhere, on a plan's going list, in a pack, in your mates list, and you get its public profile: photo, name, size, age, play styles, badges, and the owner's first name. That is the complete list of what another owner can learn about you.
Down the bottom sits Report or block, and it is deliberately undramatic.
Anyone you block is listed in settings with an unblock button, in case a bad first meeting turns out to be just that.
Everything the app wanted to tell you, newest first. Someone posted at your park, a mate is heading down, a pack plan went up, someone joined yours.
Mates are earned, not added. There are no friend requests. You both come back from the park and say it went great, and that is it.
| Your name | The first name other owners see next to your dog. |
|---|---|
| Signing in | Change password opens the middle sheet: current password, new password, done. Changing it signs out every other device. |
| Home location | Saved as a rough spot near your closest park's suburb, so you see a suburb name and not a pair of decimals. Remove it deletes it. |
| Notifications | Mates only, the weekly wrap, and whether to email you if a push fails to land. |
| Quiet hours | A window where nothing buzzes. Alex has his set from 23:00 to 05:00. |
| Push on this device | Turn phone notifications on for this phone specifically. |
| Your parks | Per park, choose all plans, mates only, or nothing. Make any of them home, or remove it. |
| Blocked | Anyone you blocked, and an unblock button. |
| Account | Sign out, or delete your account. The delete sheet on the right spells out exactly what goes with it, your dogs, plans, mates and messages, before you confirm. No exit surveys, no seven-day cooling off, no emails asking you back. |
Muttmates is a web app, so it goes on your home screen straight from the browser. No store, no download, no updates to install.
Once it is on the home screen it opens full screen with no browser bar, and it can send you push notifications.
Short version: your dog and your first name. That is all.
| Other owners see | Your dog's photo, name, size, age, play styles and badges, plus your first name. |
|---|---|
| They never see | Your surname, your email address, your home location, or where you are right now. |
| Posting a plan | Shares the park and the time. It does not share your location, then or later. |
| Location | Only used when you tap a button that asks for it, to sort parks by distance. It is not tracked in the background. |
| After-play answers | Private to you, always. The other owner is never told what you picked. |
| Blocking | Silent. You disappear from each other and nobody is notified. |
| Plan chat | Deleted a day after the plan it belongs to. |
| Packs | Invisible to anyone who is not a member, including the plans posted to them. Walking groups are packs, so the same applies. |
| Meeting spots | Private to the creator and the members of packs that meet there, until the creator makes one public. Outsiders cannot see a private spot exists. |
| Facility suggestions | Reviewed by us, published without your name. |
| Deleting your account | Takes your dogs, plans, mates and messages with it. |
Travelling with the dog often means no signal exactly when you need the map most. Muttmates now works around that.
Caravan parks and kennels used to show the same plain marker whether a place had confirmed dogs are welcome, confirmed they are not, or nobody had ever asked. Not any more.
Every stay and kennel in the list now carries one of three badges:
Results are sorted so confirmed places come first within roughly the same distance, member-confirmed next, and unconfirmed places last, without burying a park three streets away behind one an hour further on. A new filter, Only show places that take dogs, sits right above the list whenever you are browsing stays or kennels.
Behind the badges, "dog policy" now covers more than a simple yes or no. Where we know a park only allows dogs on powered sites, caps it at two dogs, or blocks them over the Christmas and Easter break, the park page shows that detail plainly instead of flattening it into a single tick.
And after a stay at a place we did not have confirmed, Muttmates asks the simple question the morning after: "Did they let [your dog] stay?" One tap of Yes or No, and an optional condition or two, updates the badge for the next traveller.
The same question now follows a booking click. If Alex is signed in and taps through to a caravan park's booking page, or a free camp's details, and the dog policy there is not confirmed, Muttmates checks back a few days later: did they let Jimbo stay? One tap answers it, with an optional note like "powered sites only". It only ever comes once per place, never for somewhere already confirmed, and it keeps to your quiet hours like every other ping.
Sometimes you just need someone to keep an eye on your dog for a couple of hours, a shop run, a swim, a look around town without the dog in tow. Or maybe you are happy to be that someone for another traveller.
If your dog needs a vet, Muttmates now finds one without you leaving the app.
Australia has five time zones and Brisbane and Sydney split by an hour for half the year. That used to mean a plan time or a reminder was worked out from wherever the app happened to be running, not from where the plan actually was. Not any more.
The home screen now tells you what has changed, not just what is coming up. A What's new list sits between the tile grid and your plans, showing the last five things that happened anywhere in the catalogue this week, a new stay or camping area going in, or a park getting its dog policy confirmed one way or the other. Tap any of them and you are straight on that park's page. Nothing older than a week, so it never turns into a scroll.
Best mates on the Profile tab now shows how many new notifications are waiting right there next to the mate count, so the number on the tab and the number on the screen finally agree.
Nobody is organising a playdate at a boarding kennel, so its page no longer pretends otherwise.
Open a kennel or sitter now and the phone number is the first thing on the page, tap it and you are calling. Hours are right there too, and if we know what they ask you to bring, a What to bring card tells you straight up, a vaccination certificate, whether you need to book ahead, how many dogs they will take at once. Ratings and comments from owners who have actually used the place are still there. The playdate buttons are gone, because they never belonged on this page.
Say where you are starting, where you are headed, and anywhere in between, and we build a stop list along the actual road, not just anywhere near the postcode.
Open Road trip planner from Settings or your Billing page, and type in a starting point and a destination. Tap + Add a stop to put up to six more stops in between, an overnight, a lunch break, a second town on the way.
We ask OSRM for the real driving line through every stop in order, then check which off-leash parks, dog beaches, caravan parks, free camps and rest areas sit within about 5km of it, ordered by how close they are to the road. Free camps are offered as overnight stops along with the caravan parks; rest areas only ever come up as leg-stretch breaks, because the planner will never tell you to spend the night at one. Once every stop resolves to a point, a map appears showing the stops, the driving line, and a Stop for a break pacing control, every hour, every 1.5, 2, 3 or 4 hours, or a custom gap. Drag a pin to fine-tune exactly where a stop lands, or tap anywhere on the map to add a new stop at the end of the trip.
Tap Plan the route and you see the total distance, the driving time, and the first three stops on the way, no account and no payment needed to try it.
One more check before you commit: national parks. Dogs are banned in every Australian national park, not even allowed to sit in the car with the windows up, and the fines are real. So the planner checks every stop you entered against the boundaries of more than 750 national parks, and if one of Alex's stops lands inside one, a warning appears right under the route summary naming the park. Time to pick a spot outside the boundary, or line up a sitter or boarding kennel for that leg. No warning means none of your stops are inside one; state forests and most conservation reserves run on different rules and stay out of it.
Your first route is ever free. Every account gets one full unlock on the house, so you can see exactly what you are paying for before you spend anything. After that, a single one-off $9.99 unlocks the whole planner, not a subscription and not per route. Pay once and every route you ever plan is yours in full, saved under Billing so you can come back to them later.
Payment runs through Stripe. We never see or store your card details, and a route only ever unlocks after Stripe confirms the payment went through.
A paid route stays editable. Open it again and the map is live: drag a stop to move it, tap the map to add one, or use a pin's popup to take a stop off. Save changes writes it back to the same route, no extra charge. The start and finish are locked, changing either is really a new trip, so that means planning and paying for a fresh route.
Print it, or send it to Google Maps. On a paid route, Print directions builds a plain turn-by-turn sheet, every stop in order with the distance and time between them, and opens your browser's print dialog. Choose Save as PDF there for a copy on your phone, no separate download needed. Open in Google Maps hands the whole trip, every stop included, straight to Google Maps for live turn-by-turn.
Billing (Settings, then Billing) is where every purchase lives, whatever it was for, with what you paid and when. It is built to hold more than road trips as we add other paid extras later.
Photos and notes from the parks, beaches, caravan parks, kennels and vets you follow, all in one stream on your home screen.
An account takes about a minute, and your park is probably already in there.
