I’ve used a few walking apps in the past but they never really hit the spot, this one so far seems to be ticking the boxes. Some great trails, good descriptions and recommendations. If you follow a trail and you go off trail it will buzz to tell you, which is good. Adds pictures you take to the route which is good.I have thought I’ve started a route a couple of times but got half way round to find it’s either gone off, stopped or maybe I didn’t just start it, no biggie if your following a previous route, only an issue for me if it’s one of my walks that’s not previously been recorded, but not losing sleep over it. All in all I’ve recommended this app to friends and work colleagues, could do with probably being able to add friends off my contacts list rather than search. All in all would highly recommend giving it a try

I really wanted to like this app. I got a 7-day free trial for Pro as I was going to a new place and needed help navigating the various routes. All fun and games until one route where my family and I ended up having to cross a dangerous river while following the supposedly ‘circular’ route. Halfway into the hike, we reached the middle of the loop but there was no bridge to cross the river. Instead, we had to turn around and walk the way we came. On the route, the app showed another path that was closer and led to a bridge to finally get over the river. By ‘path’, they meant overgrown, slippery and covered in ferns as if no one had braved it for years. That aside, I was just happy there was going to be a bridge at the end of it. Turns out, the bridge marked on the trail was a rickety, rusted floodgate that cut between the river. Keep in mind, we had a dog, so even if we shimmied along it with our feet in the water, the current was too powerful for our dog to swim (this was in the Lake District so the mountain rivers are powerful). In the end, I had to wade INTO the river, resulting in me getting soaked from the waist down, and drag my dog by her neck to cross as she was paralysed with fear. Not only that, but one of my family members took a nasty fall on the so-called ‘path’ which resulted in internal bruising. Nevertheless, after half-drowning my dog and rolling both ankles, we made it to the other side! Great, now another hour of our hike with soggy feet and bruises. Thank you AllTrails! At least you told me the gravel type that would be on the trail 😊

Whilst this looks very good and tracks your route closely and gives loads of data and telemetry, there is no easy way to shut the app down when you’re done with it. Or indeed if you abandon ship part way through. This functionality of the app is neither good nor intuitive if there is a shutdown coded in. Certainly, I couldn’t find it and I won’t be the only one to have issues. I ended up deleting it to turn it off and then binned the subscription. So, developers, build in a kill switch and make it prominent and accessible. The other issue is that this is a battery burner. Within 2 hours I went from 85 % charge down to 17 %. All good when you have a backup power source but it does make the phone’s components work hard (I was running iPhone 11 Pro with most recent iOS upgrade). Cost: £36 pa is a tad rich for what this is. For an occasional user this is bonkers. For hiking and cycling nerds who might use this every weekend etc it might make sense but that’s not the biggest market the world has ever seen. I guess that’s down to a choice. So, on balance, the app could do with some decent tweaking to make it easier to work with and use fewer system resources.