Maptrails

Map your trails

Maptrails is a map app that you can extend with any maps of your own. It comes prepacked with tens of open topographic maps and lets you annotate them with your hiking trails, place markers, photos and data layers.

The app was built as a native and familiar experience on all Apple platforms. It supports many iOS features, such as home screen widgets and Siri shortcuts.

Seamless syncing between devices

Maptrails is available for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. It keeps your data synced over iCloud and lets you view your maps and markers anywhere.

Plan upcoming hikes on a bigger screen using Mac or iPad, save them as GPX tracks and then navigate them on your iPhone and Apple Watch.

Open maps for free

Maptrails works with most tile based maps and you can freely configure additional maps and data layers to the app.

A large collection of maps from open data sources is included for free. Maptrails doesn’t require additional in-app purchases or paid subscriptions to access any of the maps that use data from open APIs.

Maptrails comes preconfigured with topographic maps such as

• USGS Topo
• Topographic Data of Canada
• Land Information New Zealand
• Switzerland’s Swisstopo
• Spanish Instituto Geográfico Nacional
• Finnish National Land Survey
• Norwegian Kartverket
• Swedish Lantmäteriet
• Danish Dataforsyningen

Annotate your maps

Draw new map layers with your finger or Apple Pencil. The map drawings are saved in a custom GeoDrawing file format, which contains the PencilKit drawing and its map coordinates.

Apple Weather and Look Around

Maptrails displays forecast data from Apple Weather at any map location, complete with wind direction and speed. It can also fetch Look Around street-level imagery that have coverage over large parts of the globe.

Apple Watch app

On the Watch, Maptrails is a simplified version of the main app, one that you can operate with a few taps. The app is freely scrollable and zooms in and out using the crown.

On supported Apple Watch models, the app can show a compass and rotate the map to match current heading. GPX tracks can be synced from the iPhone app to the Apple Watch, so that they are available offline.

Maptrails Pro

Maptrails Pro in-app purchase unlocks full functionality of the app

• Record your tracks as GPX files using your iPhone’s GPS.
• Annotate directly to your maps using Apple Pencil.
• Attach your photos to markers and see them on the map.
• Check up to date weather forecasts for any map coordinate.
• Add custom Tile Map, WMTS and WMS maps from any API.
• Add new map layers from GeoJSON and Shapefile content.
• Pair a Maptrails Beacon with the app and track it on the map.
• Use folders to manage GPX tracks and map markers.
• Import and export GPX files for your tracks and waypoints.
• Download map areas to offline storage so that they are available without network access.

A single one-time purchase unlocks Maptrails Pro on all your devices.

User privacy

It should come as no surprise that the app has no ads or external analytics. Your data should stay private.

While there are many third party services that bring nice functionality, seemingly free, their business model usually relies on monetising user data in some manner. Making matters worse, those users are mostly in the dark that this is happening at all.

Maptrails only measures aggregate app usage figures with Apple’s App Analytics, built right into the iOS platform.