It's definitely not a perfect match for everyone's tolerances. My understanding of how the step tracker works is that it grabs values from other health apps on your phone and the new feature has to track your location to work.
I'm not sure how invasive it is outside of the permissions you have to explicitly grant it, though.
Check https://heyapollo.com/ you can see a small directory of the main apps and some reviews about them. You can also leave your own ones and get some sats.