A hiking app for iPhone and Apple Watch.
Record your hikes, plan trails on offline maps and open any GPX file — with no account to make and no server holding your hikes. They live on your phone, and follow you between your own devices through your own iCloud.
Tap record and put the phone in your pocket. OpenHikes keeps the track with the screen off and fuses the barometer into the elevation, so the climb is the climb. A recording survives the app being closed. Siri and Shortcuts can start, pause and stop it, and Control Center can start and stop it.
Put stops on the map and each leg is routed along real paths, so the length is the length of the walk. Reorder the stops like directions in Apple Maps, then save the trail and hike it.
OpenStreetMap is the default, and free. Areas you browse are kept automatically, so the map you looked at last night is still there in the valley with no bars. Color the route by steepness or by difficulty.
A .gpx file from Files, AirDrop, Mail or any share sheet opens straight into the app, with its statistics and an elevation profile you can scrub. Share a hike and you get a standard GPX file back, so nothing is locked in.
Viewpoints, summits, water, shelters, camps and parking along your trail, from OpenStreetMap. Attach your photos to them, or mark places of your own.
Pictures from the hike are pinned to the point on the trail where they were taken, found by their timestamps or picked from your library. Share a hike as a picture: its line and figures over one of your own photos.
Pan the map and ask, or search by name, for hikes other people have published and the waymarked routes OpenStreetMap knows about. Publishing your own is free, and a person reviews every hike before anyone else sees it.
A widget draws your trail with its progress. While you record or follow a trail, a Live Activity keeps the figures on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island.
Apple Weather sits over the map. Finished hikes can be saved to Health as workouts, and your hikes follow you to your other devices through your own iCloud.
The Apple Watch app draws the trail you picked and shows where you are on it and how much is left. It works that out on the watch itself, so it keeps going with your phone in your bag.
It records a hike on its own, through a long walk with the screen dark, and hands the finished walk to your phone the next time the two are together. While your phone is the one recording, the watch can pause, resume and stop it.
The watch app comes with the iPhone app and needs watchOS 11 or later.
There is no OpenHikes account and no server holding your hikes. They sync through your own private iCloud, while photographs and saved maps stay on the device they came from. The app contains no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind.
Nothing you record reaches other people unless you publish it. The Privacy Policy describes exactly what the app sends, and where.
Recording, the OpenStreetMap map, GPX, photos, community trails, the widget, the Live Activity, the Apple Watch app and iCloud sync are all free.
OpenHikes Pro is a monthly subscription with a free trial. It adds commercial map styles with hillshading and contour lines, a whole route’s map downloaded before you leave, and elevation for trails that have none. Those services bill OpenHikes for every use, and paying for them is what keeps the free map free.
OpenHikes is made by one person and is open source under the MIT license. If you would rather know what it does than take a policy’s word for it, the whole app is on GitHub, along with what is being worked on next.
Something broken, unclear or missing? The support page says how to get in touch, and answers the common questions.
