Just something I've been doing for fun since the late 90's. Started off logging things by hand while my dad drove us around town looking for open wifi to use when doing field work. Later progressed to using a laptop + gps + wifi card going into an amplifier and external antenna on the van in the 2000s. That was when software started to allow for automatic logging of wifi with GPS coords.
There has definitely been a community of folks doing it even longer. See the Wigle[1] website for more, including leaderboards and stats. Some people use the data for various reasons, I do it to help track law enforcement via bluetooth & wifi mac addresses.
Warwalking is also a thing! (or riding for bikes) You can often get much better results when walking because you have a longer time to catch all the access points.
You don't really need to modify your phone either, my dedicated phone lives on the dash of my van when I'm using it so the extra cooling helps. But if you don't want to warm up your phone or drain the battery by disabling Wifi scan throttling there are also dedicated devices people are building just for war driving using esp32, etc.
There has definitely been a community of folks doing it even longer. See the Wigle[1] website for more, including leaderboards and stats. Some people use the data for various reasons, I do it to help track law enforcement via bluetooth & wifi mac addresses.
Warwalking is also a thing! (or riding for bikes) You can often get much better results when walking because you have a longer time to catch all the access points.
You don't really need to modify your phone either, my dedicated phone lives on the dash of my van when I'm using it so the extra cooling helps. But if you don't want to warm up your phone or drain the battery by disabling Wifi scan throttling there are also dedicated devices people are building just for war driving using esp32, etc.
[1]https://wigle.net/