Global Adventurer
We built Global Adventurer, a hiking and cycling app for iPhone and Apple Watch: routes planned along real paths, and maps that keep working without a signal.
globaladventurer.com
A map drawn for walking or cycling
Global Adventurer draws its own topographic map, styled for people on paths rather than in cars. Paths and contours come first, roads stay quiet, and orange and red are kept for the walker’s own track and route, so they never get lost in the map. Walkers can switch between Topo, Terrain, Minimal, Satellite and Standard views, show marked trails, and see open access land in England.
Maps can be downloaded for an area, or along the length of a route, before setting off. When a walker follows a saved or imported route, a panel at the top shows the next waypoint, the distance left and the climb and descent still to come.
Plan the line before you leave
Tap a destination, or a few points along the way, and the line is drawn along real paths rather than the road beside them, with the distance, the climb and an estimated time before the walker takes a step. A route can be told to join a waymarked trail: the app lists the National Trails, long-distance paths, regional walks and cycle routes within reach, and fetches only the stretch that day needs, so even the European E9 comes back quickly.
Routes can be planned on the phone or in a browser. Planning needs a connection and paths that OpenStreetMap has mapped; once planned, a route is saved and followed offline like any other.
Every outing recorded and easy to find
One tap starts a walk or a ride. Distance, time and ascent update as the walker moves, recording carries on with the screen off, and progress shows on the Lock Screen. If the phone runs out of memory mid-walk, the outing is recovered the next time the app opens.
Saved activities are listed with a small drawing of each route, and can be searched, sorted, renamed and grouped into collections, with photos and notes attached to the day. The home screen shows the most recent adventure, the year so far and a walk from the same day in an earlier year. Activities can be imported from GPX, KML, CSV and other common formats, exported again, saved to Apple Health as workouts, and exchanged with Garmin Connect and Strava.
Routes to follow and summits to collect
The Route Store carries every UK National Trail, Scotland’s Great Trails, Sustrans rides and well-known long-distance walks from further afield, each a GPX with its heights, its figures and a route card. All of them are free: a walker adds one to their activities, then follows it, takes its map offline or sends it to the watch. A saved route can be reversed, started from anywhere, edited, opened in Google Earth, or flown over in 3D and kept as a video.
Alongside them the app keeps the named tops around the walker, nearest first, with their heights and the hill lists they belong to — the Wainwrights, the Munros, the Colorado 14ers, the Alpine 4000ers and more than thirty others across Britain and Ireland, the Alps, the Pyrenees, Norway, Korea and the United States.
Help when it matters most
A red SOS button sits on the map at all times. It opens an Emergency Location screen with buttons to call 999 or 112, and shows the walker’s position in large, high-contrast type: a British or Irish grid reference, latitude and longitude in two formats, altitude and how accurate the GPS fix is. Everything can be copied or shared in one tap, ready to read out to Mountain Rescue.
While a route is being followed, the app warns the walker with a vibration, a banner and a spoken alert if they stray from the line, and confirms when they are back on it. In winter the map can shade slope angle and aspect, with the avalanche danger from the national services across the Alps, the Pyrenees, Scotland, Scandinavia, the United States and Canada shown beside it.
Private, native and in nine languages
eplatforms built Global Adventurer natively for iPhone, with maps drawn on the phone itself, so labels stay crisp at every zoom. There is no account to create, no advertising and no analytics, and activities stay on the walker’s own devices and in their own iCloud.
- An Apple Watch app shows the stats, a bearing to the next point and an offline map, and can record with its own GPS and heart rate while the phone stays in the pack
- Siri and the Action button can start and stop a recording
- eplatforms also built the app’s website, globaladventurer.com
- App and website are both in English, French, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Hebrew and Arabic, with right-to-left layouts for Arabic and Hebrew
A calm companion for a day on the hill
Related service: Mobile App Development
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