OnlyTrails

Your hike is saved on your phone before anything else. Not in an account, not after a sync: the recording, the route and the map are on the device in your hand from the moment you press start.

It works with no signal and no account. Download a trail’s topo tiles once and follow it with the radio off. Finish and save a hike with no session, no server and no bars.

Apple Watch runs the same navigation, not a remote control for it — the route, the off-route alarm and the eyes-free cues are on the watch, and stay there when the phone is in your pack.

OFFLINE TOPO MAPS
• OpenTopoMap tiles with true contour lines and hillshade, plus USGS Topo and standard basemaps
• Download the tile corridor along the whole route, not a rough box around it
• Trail lines colored by steepness, with an elevation profile and grade chart

NAVIGATION THAT SURVIVES THE DAY
• Off-route alarm plus a saved breadcrumb log for retrace and where-am-I, offline
• Eyes-free mode: spoken and haptic fork cues on a near-black glance screen
• Adaptive GPS drops to coarse between forks and counts steps with the motion coprocessor, waking full GPS at the decision points
• A battery-versus-ETA budget that tightens power saving as your charge drops

BRING YOUR OWN ROUTE
• Open any .gpx from Files, AirDrop or another app
• Draw a route on the map, snap it to real paths, or fork someone else’s and edit it
• Automatic distance, elevation gain and drop, grade and difficulty

ALWAYS FREE, NEVER GATED
• Starting, finishing and saving a recording
• Opening an offline map you have already downloaded
• Exporting your own routes and recordings as GPX
• Following a route, the off-route alarm, retrace and where-am-I
• Watch navigation of a route on the phone
• The app itself, without an account, offline, indefinitely

THE CATALOG, HONESTLY
The community catalog is deepest in Chiang Mai and northern Thailand today — that is where the hikers and the verified routes are. Anywhere else, bring your own: import a GPX, draw a route, or just record as you walk. Recording, navigating and saving work the same everywhere on earth.

COMMUNITY
• Share and discover routes, with crowd difficulty voting and reviews
• Junction markings (Bee · Thorn · Slippery · Fork) and “What-the-Fork” photos pinned to confusing forks
• Group hikes and events, with a poster you can paste straight into a chat

Map tiles © OpenTopoMap (CC-BY-SA) and © OpenStreetMap contributors. USGS Topo tiles courtesy of The National Map.