Hiking and cycling: These outdoor apps make navigating and planning the route easier

In the children’s book “Here comes the duck’s nonsense, good luck with the tavern pig,” the duck and her friends plan a trip to the most beautiful place. But where is this exactly? Route planning and navigation apps help get closer to the answer by showing users new routes, saving their favorite rides, and sharing fun waypoints with others.

Apps like Komoot, Outdooractive, BRouter, and OsmA use OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a map that provides users with materials without licensing costs, but with geographic data used. OSM user account owners can also edit map materials and add geographic information.

OpenStreetMap is an alternative to Google Maps, its materials cannot be changed as desired and used in your own projects. The Google Navigation app reacts very quickly to traffic jams and delays and suggests alternative routes. Among other things, it gets its information from the behavior of the app’s users: for example, if several map users are driving slowly at some point, Google suspects a traffic disruption there.

Road as goal

With Google Maps, pedestrians and cyclists can get from A to B quickly, but roads often lead along highways. If you are looking for a gentle tour with sights, a specific deck, or opportunities to take a break, tour operators like Komoot or Outdooractive are more suitable.

Thanks to its large community that contains it Comot Meanwhile, most of the hiking and cycling trips are planned in Germany. App users get inspiration for new tracks, take photos, comment on their favorite tours and share them with others. When planning, Komoot takes into account different types of movement such as hiking, walking or cycling, fitness level and whether you just want to go there or come back again. If you just want to record your route, you can track your tour – the app automatically detects whether you are running or walking. Komoot is compatible with sports watches from Garmin and Polar, Apple Watch, navigation devices from Garmin, Wahoo and Sigma, on-board computers from Nyon and Kiox e-bikes.

Another app that has loads of pre-made rounds for different types of exercises is in the fresh air. When planning the tours, users of the free version can use many filter options to create a convenient route. Sports that can be selected include Nordic walking, horse riding and canoeing. Outdooractive displays various icons on the map, such as the perspectives that users can incorporate into their tour. You can also create your own tracks.

Outdooractive has comprehensive information on destinations, such as accommodations with e-bike charging stations and the current weather. However, the app only shows some tracks in the paid Pro version. With Outdooractive Pro +, subscribers also receive additional tours of Kompass and ADAC hiking guides as well as access to Alpine club maps.

Unknown heights

Outdooractive and Komoot users often criticize incorrect altitude information on rides. When calculating elevation meters, the path points and the elevation model used play an important role. Basically, all climbing runs are added from start to finish. If there are too few trackpoints in a fitted track log, the elevations are lost between levels, resulting in rigging of the elevator meters displayed – if there are too many, the elevation meters may be too large.

With spontaneous changes in direction, Komoot and Outdooractive reach their limits and ask their users to return to the original path. The corresponding ads are very annoying and in some cases they are ridiculous, because you often veer off track because it is forbidden or because you want to take a shortcut.

Offline navigation

Web service scratch OsmAnd interacts more flexibly with spontaneous excursions into nature and recalculates the route – without any internet connection. For example, to plan a bike race tour using BRouter Web, users design a track underneath it brouter.de On the computer and then export it as a GPX file. This file format is used to store geographic data and is supported by most navigation and route planning applications.

A GPX file can be used in the Komoot application under “Tours” and “File Import”. If the imported path contains partitions that do not use the Komoot path network, you can “follow the original path” or “adapt the path to known paths”. In the first case, Komoot does not provide navigation for these paths. They appear in dashed lines on the map.

BRouter offers a variety of setup options for tours in OpenStreetMap blogging, which isn’t necessarily understandable to laymen. Experts in turn can enter their own code under “Settings” and “Profile” or use excerpts from GitHub. The source code is in the GitHub user repository doctor 😊 It excludes cobbled roads from the calculation, for example – an important criterion for cyclists in racing. BRouter is also available as an app. To get around, you have to use this with an app like OsmAnd, Location maps or OruxMaps use.

Another tour app that is useful for offline navigation is OsmAnd. Running OsmAnd is a little more complicated than running Komoot and Outdooractive, which is why beginners need to get familiar with the app first. If that doesn’t stop you, you get a tool with several navigation options, route planning, and a detailed map, whose appearance can be changed to suit current sports (such as terrain or off-road), as well as display of points of interest and superimposed contour lines.

After users download the maps they are interested in, OsmAnd saves and calculates the tours offline and locally, that is, directly on the smartphone. It is important to ensure that you only download maps of the places you want to drive or hike, otherwise the memory of photos and videos may not be sufficient.

If you are looking for a pure bike tours app, there are apps like Bike Citizens. Depending on whether you want to work fast or are looking for a comfortable drive, there are “comfortable”, “normal” and “fast” road options. In the premium version, users can download maps and create heat maps for their trips.