Short answer first: over 100,000 steps, not one of the seven apps reached a withdrawal threshold, so I have no payout screenshot to show you. What I do have is a clear read on which ones are worth space on your phone, and which ones you can delete on day one.
How I picked the apps
I had ChatGPT list the step-paying apps available in my country, more than 20 of them. I cut that to five, dropping the ones with scam reports and the ones that run GPS tracking, which eats the battery. Most of what survived pays in cryptocurrency rather than cash. That is worth knowing before you install anything.
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One email per experiment. Full numbers, no fluff.
The apps, one by one
Macadam
Over 1,000 coins for 100,000 steps, and the smallest withdrawal needs 15,000. No ads, nothing to fiddle with. This is the one I kept.
Smiles
The reward looked the same whether I did 10,000 or 20,000 steps in a day, and it was small either way.
Sweatcoin
The walking rewards are tiny. I kept it only for the prize draws, where earned sweatcoins buy entries. I have almost 300 entries in an iPhone 17 draw.
Aruco
Steps barely matter: one drop a day, five if you watch an ad, and 10,000 needed to withdraw. Deleted.
Robofix
You convert steps into coins by hand, and on the free plan every conversion means watching an ad, a limited number of times per day. Deleted.
StepBet and Steppa
A different model entirely: you pay to join a step challenge. Finish it and you get your money back; the people who do not finish lose theirs, and the finishers split the pot. I joined one to see how it goes.
What I kept
Macadam, Sweatcoin, StepBet and Steppa. The rest came off the phone.
The honest verdict
Stacking step apps does not turn walking into income. Treat the coin apps as something that accumulates quietly in the background on a phone you were carrying anyway, and treat the challenge apps as what they actually are: a bet on your own consistency, not a payout.
This is the same test I run on everything else here. If you want the numbers from the other experiments, I wrote up what my 3D printing side hustle has actually made and what I did after AdSense kept rejecting me.
Paid research studies are the other end of this scale: fewer chances, much better money per hour. I wrote up that one too — is Respondent.io legit? I got paid $95 for one hour.
The one that actually stuck: of everything I have tested, renting out four things I already owned earns €30–€50 a month for about an hour of work, which is the best work-to-income ratio I have found so far.
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