About Us
Free Digital Compass is a single-purpose tool with one job: to tell you which way you are facing, as quickly as possible, on the phone already in your hand.
The short version: open the compass, tap Enable Compass, and read your heading. It is free, it needs no account, and the heading never leaves your device.
What this is
A digital compass that runs in your browser. Your phone already has the sensor — a magnetometer, plus the orientation sensors that tell the device how it is being held. What it does not have is a way to read them without installing an app, so this site is that way in.
It is built as a progressive web app, so it can be added to your home screen and opened full-screen like a native app. Once the page has loaded it needs no network connection at all, which makes it usable in the places a compass is most often wanted and least often available.
Why we built it
Searching for a compass online tended to lead to pages where the compass was the smallest thing on the screen: an interstitial, a cookie wall and a row of ad slots around a dial that had not been thought about. Several would show a confident heading on a device with no magnetometer, because a spinning dial looks more finished than an admission that there is nothing to read.
So the dial came first here, and everything else had to earn its place around it. That is the whole method.
What it deliberately leaves out
Local by default
The magnetometer reading is processed on your device and never transmitted. No account, no profile, no analytics: there is nothing about you to store.
Honest readings
A reading is shown while it can be trusted and the compass says so plainly when it cannot. A number that looks confident and is not is worse than no number.
One job, no ceremony
No install, no sign-up, no onboarding tour. Open the page and the dial is there, and it works offline once it has loaded.
Being free is part of the design rather than a promotion. There is no account to create, no premium tier to be upsold to, and no advertising profile being assembled in the background — which is also why there is no reason to ask who you are. The privacy policy states the same thing in more formal language.
How it handles accuracy
Precision here is honest rather than flattering. A phone magnetometer is typically good to a few degrees in the open and considerably worse near metal, a car dashboard or a magnetic case. Rather than dress that up, the compass stays quiet while the reading is trustworthy and then says so plainly when it drifts: the Calibrate control highlights itself, and a figure-8 motion clears it in a few seconds.
The heading shown is magnetic north — the direction the sensor physically measures, and the direction a needle swings to. No declination correction is applied, because correcting to true north requires knowing where you are, and this compass never asks. The trade is explained in the FAQ, and accuracy & calibration covers what the hardware can really do.
How it is built
The site is served as static files. There is no backend calculating anything, no database of users, and no server that ever sees a heading — the compass is a self-contained page that reads a sensor and draws a dial. That architecture is what makes the privacy claims on this site possible to keep, rather than merely promised.
Get in touch
Questions, bug reports and corrections are all welcome — particularly corrections, since the guidance pages are only worth anything if they are right. Write to [email protected] , or see the contact page for what to include.