OpenHikes is a hiking app for iPhone and Apple Watch, made by one person. If something is broken, unclear, or missing, writing to me is the fastest way to get it looked at — there is no support queue standing between us.
Email zsombor.rajki@gmail.com. You do not need an account of any kind to write, and you will get a reply from a person.
If you have a GitHub account, a bug report or feature request is also welcome at the issue tracker, where you can see what is already known and what is being worked on. Email and the tracker reach the same place; use whichever you prefer.
It helps, but is not required, to include your iPhone model, your iOS version, the version of OpenHikes shown under Settings → About → Version, and what you were doing when it went wrong. If the watch was involved, its model and watchOS version too.
Reports and removal requests are read and acted on within 24 hours.
Both can be done from inside the app, and that is the quickest route because the message arrives already carrying which hike you mean:
If the app cannot send the message for any reason — no mail app on the device, for instance — email zsombor.rajki@gmail.com directly and describe the hike. Anything published can be taken down on the author’s request.
OpenHikes runs on iPhone and needs iOS 18.4 or later. It comes with an Apple Watch app, which needs watchOS 11 or later; it is part of the same app rather than a separate purchase, and it installs from the Watch app on your phone the way any companion app does. There is no iPad version.
Not an OpenHikes one — there isn’t one to make. Your hikes live on your phone, and browsing and saving hikes other people have shared needs no account of any kind. Sending something to the community is the exception: publishing one of your own hikes, or adding your photographs to a shared one, needs your iPhone to be signed in to an Apple Account, because that is what the community database accepts a submission from. The privacy policy says what is recorded when you do.
Recording needs location access to keep running with the screen off. In the iOS Settings app, go to Apps → OpenHikes → Location, and check that access is set to While Using the App or Always and that Precise Location is on. Low Power Mode can also thin out location updates. A recording survives the app being closed or crashing, so if something went wrong mid-hike, reopen the app before deleting anything — it will offer to recover the recording.
Three things. It shows the hikes on your phone, and draws the one you pick as a line on the map with how far along you are, how much is left, and how far off the trail you have wandered — all worked out on the watch itself, so it keeps answering with the phone in a rucksack or out of range. 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. And while your phone is the one recording, the watch shows that recording and can pause, resume and stop it.
Recording on the watch starts a hiking workout, which is the only thing watchOS offers that keeps an app running with your wrist down. That workout is thrown away when the recording ends rather than saved, so a walk recorded on the watch does not put a second entry in Health: the hike goes to your phone, and your phone writes it to Health once if you have turned Save Hikes to Health on there. The watch does read your heart rate while it records, to show it as you walk. The app only shows that reading, and does not add it to the hike or send it anywhere, though Health may keep the readings the watch took during the workout.
It is still on the watch, and it is not lost. A finished walk is written to the watch’s own storage the moment you stop recording, and it is removed only once your phone has confirmed it has it — so a phone that was out of range, switched off, or flat for the rest of the day delays the hand-over and nothing else. Bring the two together with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi on and it goes over on its own; opening OpenHikes on the watch tries to send anything still waiting straight away. Do not delete the watch app while a walk is waiting, because that is the only copy there is.
That depends on whether you are recording a hike or following a saved trail.
While you are recording on your iPhone, the recording itself feeds both, with the phone locked as well as with the app open, and needs no more location access than recording does: While Using the App is enough. It does not need Background Trail Tracking or “Always” access, and no trail has to be selected; a recording takes over the widget and the Live Activity even along a trail you are following. The Live Activity keeps up as you walk, but the widget is a glance: it catches up a few times an hour rather than with every step, and iOS can space that out further, so a widget some minutes behind is working as it should. If the distance on the Live Activity stops going up while you are still walking, the recording has probably stopped receiving locations, which the question about gaps above covers. The exception is a long day: iOS ends every Live Activity after eight hours, and its distance stays where it was while the recording carries on. A recording on the Apple Watch shows on the watch and not on your phone’s widget or Live Activity; the phone sees it once you stop and it is handed over.
While you are following a saved trail without recording, both keep up while that trail is open on screen with Follow on. Keeping them current with the phone locked or the app closed is what Background Trail Tracking in the app’s Settings does, and it is off until you turn it on. Turning it on asks for “Always” location access, which iOS requires for this and nothing else in the app. It also only does anything while you have a trail selected and are actually near it, or while a walk along a trail is under way, which is deliberate: a trail left selected from last summer costs you no battery. The exception is a trail more than about 180 kilometers across, which is too large an area for the app to watch: while one is selected, it stays on wherever you are.
Either way, if no Live Activity appears at all, check that Show on Lock Screen is on under Live Activity in the app’s Settings, and that Live Activities are allowed for OpenHikes in the iOS Settings app.
Areas you have browsed are kept automatically, so ground you looked at with a signal is still there without one. Ground you have never opened was never downloaded. Apple Maps and Apple Satellite are drawn by Apple, and OpenHikes cannot save either of them for offline use; Apple Satellite always needs a connection. If the map is blank with a connection, check Settings for the selected map source: Stadia Outdoors, Stamen Terrain and Thunderforest Outdoors need an OpenHikes Pro subscription, while OpenStreetMap, Apple Maps and Apple Satellite are free and always available. You can see and clear what is stored under Offline Storage.
Open the .gpx from anywhere on the phone — Files, Mail, AirDrop, a download, any share sheet — and choose OpenHikes. It imports with its route, its statistics and its metadata.
Open the hike and use Share. You get a standard GPX 1.1 file that any other app or website will read. For a hike with photographs, Share Hike with Photos gives you a .zip file with the same GPX file and the original photographs beside it. Nothing you record is locked in here.
Hikes sync through your own private iCloud storage, so both devices must be signed in to the same Apple Account with iCloud Drive on, and sync must be left enabled in the app’s settings. Two things deliberately do not sync: photographs and downloaded map tiles. Both are large, and both stay on the device that made them.
Pictures taken with the system camera during a recording are matched afterwards by their timestamps — open the hike and use Find Photos of This Hike. That reads only the photographs taken while you were out on that trail: while its own track was being recorded, if the track carries times (anything recorded in the app does), and during each walk along it that you followed in the app and finished — each with a few minutes either side. Every one of those outings is searched on its own, so a trail walked twice a year apart is two short searches, never one across the year in between. If you granted access to just a few selected photos rather than the whole library, that works, but only the photos you selected can be found.
Deleting a hike in the app deletes it. Deleting the app removes everything it stored on that device, but not the copy already synced to your iCloud storage: neither deleting the app nor turning off iCloud sync touches that, and reinstalling with sync on brings those hikes back. To delete the synced copy, open the iOS Settings app and go to your name → iCloud → Storage (Manage Account Storage on some versions of iOS) → OpenHikes → Delete Data from iCloud. Because there is no account and no server holding your hikes, there is nothing else of yours for me to delete — with one exception: a hike you chose to publish, which you can take down at any time using Ask for Removal.
Everything in OpenHikes is free except three commercial map styles — Stadia Outdoors, Stamen Terrain and Thunderforest Outdoors — downloading a whole route’s Stadia map in advance, and elevation for trails you draw, routes found on OpenStreetMap and hikes imported without it (the climb, the profile and the steepness colors), which comes from Stadia’s elevation service. Those services bill OpenHikes for every use, which is the reason they cost something; the free OpenStreetMap map is the one that costs nothing to serve, and it stays the default. Recording, GPX import and export, photos, community hikes, the widget, the Live Activity, the Apple Watch app and iCloud sync are all free and always will be.
The subscription is monthly, starts with a free trial, and is shareable with your family. The price in your region is shown in the App Store and on the subscription screen in the app before you buy anything.
Open Settings in the app, tap OpenHikes Pro under About, and use Restore Purchases. Make sure the device is signed in to the same Apple Account that bought the subscription. If it still will not unlock, email me — include the Apple Account email used for the purchase, and I can tell you what the App Store is reporting.
Subscriptions are managed by Apple, not by OpenHikes. Cancel at apps.apple.com/account/subscriptions, or in the iOS Settings app under your name → Subscriptions. Canceling stops the renewal and leaves the subscription running until the end of the period you paid for.
Refunds are handled by Apple, who take the payment. Request one at reportaproblem.apple.com. If the reason was something broken in the app, please tell me too, so it gets fixed.
The Privacy Policy describes exactly what the app sends and where, including the one case where anything reaches me: sharing with the community. The Terms and Conditions cover use of the app and of the sharing feature.
OpenHikes is open source under the MIT license. If you want to know what it actually does rather than take a policy’s word for it, the whole thing is readable.