Trekmap: 3D Topo Hiking Maps

Trekmap is a hiking map built around the thing other map apps flatten away: the shape of the ground. Every surface is rendered with real 3D elevation, so a contour line stops being an abstraction and becomes a slope you can lean into and orbit before you ever walk it. TERRAIN, NOT TRAFFIC • Tilt, rotate and orbit real 3D terrain — topographic, satellite or hybrid • Shops and petrol stations are off by default, because they bury the ground you came to read • Search made for the outdoors: trailheads, summits, waterfalls, huts, hot springs, campsites • Tap anywhere for distance, bearing and the sun times at that exact spot THE CROSSHAIR The map continuously reads out the grid reference under the centre of the screen, the way a thumb on a paper map does. Tap it to see the same point in five notations at once — decimal degrees, degrees and minutes, DMS, UTM and MGRS — and copy whichever one the person on the other end of the radio is asking for. HONEST NUMBERS Most walking apps inflate your climbing. Summing every positive altitude change turns a flat towpath into 200 m of ascent, because each GPS fix wobbles a metre or two. Trekmap holds an anchor and banks a climb only once the ground has genuinely risen, so the figure matches the contour lines. Altitude runs through a median filter rather than an average, because GPS fails by throwing out the occasional wild value. On devices with a barometer, it sharpens the shape between fixes while GPS supplies the sea-level datum. Every threshold is a slider with a plain explanation of what it does to your numbers. Under forest canopy a strict accuracy gate throws away the whole walk; on an open ridge a loose ascent threshold counts every wobble as a climb. You decide. RECORD LIKE A GPS WATCH • A face built for one hand, in the rain, at arm's length • Distance, ascent, descent, pace, altitude, live grade • A grade gauge drawn at the angle you are actually walking, coloured by steepness • Signal strength and — unusually — a count of how many fixes were rejected, so a bad stretch is visible instead of silently drawn as a straight line • One-tap marks for water, junctions, viewpoints and hazards; nine kinds with notes • Six activities, each with its own moving threshold • Keeps recording with the screen off KNOW WHEN THE LIGHT GOES Sunrise, sunset, civil twilight and golden hour are computed on the device with the NOAA solar algorithm. No signal needed — which is exactly when you need it, at the bottom of a valley, deciding whether to push for the summit. The daylight bar switches colour inside the last hour of light. READ THE WALK BACK • Map line coloured by steepness, not one flat colour • Hand-drawn elevation profile with the fill banded by grade — drag across it and a marker runs along the ridge on the map • A breakdown of how much ground fell in each steepness class • The longest sustained hard section, called out • Marks, notes, and per-month totals WORKS WITH EVERYTHING ELSE Import GPX from any other mapping app, and export any walk as standard GPX. YOUR DATA STAYS YOURS No account. No analytics SDK, no advertising identifier, no third-party network code. Tracks live in this app's own storage on your device. Two things leave the phone, both to Apple: the map tiles you are looking at and the text of a place search. Everything else stays here. One action exports it all as GPX; one deletes it. HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT CANNOT DO Apple publishes no elevation API, so Trekmap draws a profile for a walk you have recorded or imported, but not for a line merely traced on the map. Apple Maps has no footpath data for a lot of wild ground, so a walking line sometimes cannot be found — and the app says so, giving you the bearing and distance rather than inventing a route. There is no offline map yet. Where data is missing, Trekmap tells you instead of filling the gap with a plausible-looking number.