OnlyTrails
Topo maps & offline trail nav
Free · Designed for iPhone. Not verified for macOS.
Contour-line topo maps, GPX import, and a Smart Energy Save navigator that sips battery on long backcountry hikes.
OnlyTrails is a native hiking companion built for the backcountry — real topographic maps with contour lines, offline navigation, and a power system designed to survive an all-day hike.
TOPOGRAPHIC MAPS
• OpenTopoMap tiles with true contour lines and hillshade
• Trail polylines colored by steepness, plus an elevation profile and grade chart
• USGS Topo and standard basemaps included
IMPORT YOUR TRAILS
• Open any .gpx file from Files, AirDrop, or another app
• Automatic distance, elevation gain/drop, grade, and difficulty
SMART ENERGY SAVE NAVIGATION
• Download a trail's tile corridor for true offline maps — no signal needed
• Adaptive GPS that drops to coarse between trail forks and uses the motion coprocessor's pedometer to track progress, waking full GPS only at decision points
• Eyes-free mode: spoken and haptic fork cues with a near-black glance screen
• Battery-vs-ETA budget that escalates power saving as your charge tightens
• Off-route alarm and a persisted breadcrumb log for retrace and where-am-I, even offline
COMMUNITY
• Share and discover trails
• Crowd difficulty voting, reviews, and junction markings (Bee · Thorn · Slippery · Fork)
• "What-the-Fork" photos pinned to confusing junctions
Map tiles © OpenTopoMap (CC-BY-SA) and © OpenStreetMap contributors. USGS Topo tiles courtesy of The National Map.
more • Your trails are on your Apple Watch without sending them there — anything you download or save syncs on its own, many trails at a time. The watch app now installs on Series 9, Ultra 2 and newer too.
• The 3-D recap plays your photos where you took them: each one pinned on the route, opening as the replay reaches it.
• Join a group hike and its trail downloads itself for offline while you still have signal — and the organizer hears that you're coming.
• An invitation shows you the trail before it asks for anything, and "Sign in to join" now actually joins.
• Signing in starts with your email and works out the rest — no more choosing between "sign in" and "create account".
• A group hike's payment code now carries the amount, so nobody types the price into their banking app.
• Links inside the app open the app: tap a trail or a hiker and you land on the real screen, in your language.
1.15 1d ago
• Trail events, done properly: create one from a trail and you land on the event you just made — and events now sit directly under the trail's stats, date first, because they are the one thing on that page with a deadline
• Your private hikes are back on your own profile, marked with a lock, and your lifetime totals match what the page shows
• The drive home is no longer saved as part of the hike: when a recording ends with a stretch you clearly drove, the save screen offers to trim it, and nothing is cut without your answer
• Spoken cues now speak your language, in a voice that speaks it — forks, turns, off-route, arrival, retrace and battery warnings, down to the compass directions inside them
• Expedition mode: a dark theme whose deepest surfaces are pure black, so an OLED screen switches those pixels off when you are days from a charger
• The route line is readable on any basemap, with a halo and a dark bed under the steepness colour, and where you are now draws over where you are going
• Direction arrows along the whole route, live numbers that hold their place instead of jittering as they count, and a photo you can attach to a review from an iPhone
• Less battery on a long day: the compass stops while the app is in the background, and navigation does less work on every GPS fix
1.14 2d ago
• Walking a route in reverse now works from the moment you set off, not just once you are already on it: join a trail partway along and head back the way it was recorded, and the app locks on straight away instead of leaving the whole route showing as distance left
• Loops started mid-way and walked the other way round are picked up within a few steps, and the whole walk counts toward finishing them
• On trails that double back on themselves, walking the return leg no longer matches you to the leg beside it — so the climb ahead and the next waypoint are the ones you are actually walking to
• The trip bar now leads with how far you have walked, beside distance left and moving pace
• The sunset warning clears once the sun is down instead of staying up for the rest of the hike
• New Map Style settings: set the route line's thickness, whether it shows direction arrows, and how other nearby trails are drawn — which are now much easier to pick out at a junction
1.13 6d ago
• Fixed a crash that could quit the app when you finished a hike with the screen dimmed
• Loops and trails walked in reverse now match properly: distance remaining counts down toward the end you are actually heading for, and arrival no longer announces itself at the trailhead
• The dimmed part of the route follows your real position on the trail, in either direction
• The elevation card draws your recording over the planned route, so you can see where the two differ
• Hikes finished offline appear on your profile straight away, with your stats and badges updated
• Peak Match: fixed labels that were showing placeholder text
1.12 6d ago
• Fixed a crash that could quit the app when you finished a hike with the screen dimmed
• Loops and trails walked in reverse now match properly: distance remaining counts down toward the end you are actually heading for, and arrival no longer announces itself at the trailhead
• The dimmed part of the route follows your real position on the trail, in either direction
• The elevation card draws your recording over the planned route, so you can see where the two differ
• Hikes finished offline appear on your profile straight away, with your stats and badges updated
• Peak Match: fixed labels that were showing placeholder text
1.11 Aug 13
• Added an icon-only floating tab bar for consistent navigation on iOS 18 and later
• The Create tab keeps its familiar filled plus-circle icon
• Improved tab transitions and layout compatibility across screen sizes
1.10 Aug 12
• Contour lines now appear across Explore, route planning, and trail maps, with clearer steepness colors and direction arrows
• Elevation profiles and 3D recaps are cleaner and easier to read
• Finish and Discard now reliably remove navigation Live Activities and turn alerts
1.9 Aug 9
• Peak Match draws the ridge in front as well as the peaks behind it — a near crest no longer hides what it cuts across
• Peak names load reliably again, even in ranges with hundreds of summits
• Turn the phone sideways and peak names stay upright
• Explore's map controls are in two groups — finding a trail on the left, changing the view on the right
1.8 Aug 7
• Mark a spot using a photo you already took — the marking form now opens on the hike's own photos
• The hike's photo folder is open while you walk, and shows your shots as a grid
• Private trails now say so, and you can rename a trail you published
• Recent walks show where they happened
1.7 Aug 5
• Redesigned hike photos with swipeable galleries, overlays, and richer photo details
• Profiles now share the same stamp-board experience before and after sign-in
• Signed-out hikers can open All Hikes and import workouts from Health
1.6 Aug 4
• Terrain stamps: finish a trail to earn a hand-carved seal shaped from its terrain, and collect them all on your sticker board
• Recap flyover: replay a finished hike as a cinematic flyover of your route
• Bug fixes and performance improvements
1.5 Aug 1
• Terrain stamps: finish a trail to earn a hand-carved seal shaped from its terrain, and collect them all on your sticker board
• Recap flyover: replay a finished hike as a cinematic flyover of your route
• Send your trail stamps in Messages — the new Trail Stamps iMessage app: tap a stamp to send it with a link to the hike, or peel one onto any bubble as a sticker
• A floating camera on the navigation screen: take trail photos without losing sight of the map
• Public hikes earn stamps — hide a hike and its stamp leaves your board; share it again and the same stamp comes back
• Activity cards now lead with the route you walked, plus pace, climb, the weather, and the stamp that hike earned
• More accurate elevation: your recorded climb is re-checked against topographic data, correcting barometer drift and GPS altitude spikes — and it works offline on downloaded trails
• Bug fixes and performance improvements
1.4 Jul 31
• Trail photos: pinch to zoom and swipe to dismiss in the photo viewer, with smoother paging
• Route planner: draw a route freehand and snap it to trails, jump to your location, and drafts autosave
• Join and manage paid events
• Apple Watch navigation improvements
• Now available in Hebrew and Arabic
• Bug fixes and performance improvements
1.3 Jul 25
• Sign in with Apple
• Open onlytrails.app links straight in the app, and send trails from the web to your phone
• Clearer offline banner and smarter location-permission prompts, with a re-grant shortcut in Settings
• Explore and route planner refinements
• Bug fixes and performance improvements
1.2 Jul 22
• Send any trail to Garmin, Suunto and other watches via GPX course handoff
• Cleaner recorded hikes — smarter GPS smoothing filters out jitter
• Redesigned trail detail with clearer, easier-to-scan sections
• Apple Watch refinements
• Bug fixes and performance improvements
1.1 Jul 17
• Your trails are on your Apple Watch without sending them there — anything you download or save syncs on its own, many trails at a time. The watch app now installs on Series 9, Ultra 2 and newer too.
• The 3-D recap plays your photos where you took them: each one pinned on the route, opening as the replay reaches it.
• Join a group hike and its trail downloads itself for offline while you still have signal — and the organizer hears that you're coming.
• An invitation shows you the trail before it asks for anything, and "Sign in to join" now actually joins.
• Signing in starts with your email and works out the rest — no more choosing between "sign in" and "create account".
• A group hike's payment code now carries the amount, so nobody types the price into their banking app.
• Links inside the app open the app: tap a trail or a hiker and you land on the real screen, in your language.
more Version 1.15 1d ago
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