Have been looking for something like this! Alltrails and many other products (even paid Pro, which i have) is total garbage. There is a huge market for a great offline-first hiking/exploring maps app.
There are a couple of apps that are very good in their own right, but not quite what hikers need.
TrailForks[1] is in many ways the ideal app for mountain biking, and a great example of what a "trail recommendation" app for hikers should be. It combines the best trail data with easy navigation, planning and routing. What's really unique about it is that they got buy-in from a huge number of regional trail organizations and land managers, so it's frequently updated and generally quite accurate.
When you're riding in an area you're unfamiliar with, it's really easy to put together a good route, read reviews from other users and check out trail conditions.
Gaia GPS[2] is probably the best outdoor mapping app. It doesn't have social functions or trail recommendations, but you can grab layers from just about everywhere, from USGS topo maps, to forest service maps, specialty layers and more. It's great at tracking where you've been, planning routes based on map data and making it hard to get lost while you're out there.
I think the ultimate hiking app would be some combination of "Trailforks but for hiking" and Gaia.
One disclaimer about those apps, they were both recently acquired by Outside Inc., so far they haven't been ruined, but I (and other dedicated users) are worried that corporate ownership won't be good for either app/community.
Just a note about Trailforks. It was introduced as a crowdsourced, free application/service which was lacking data, but had a huge audience. So people little by little put a lot of riding data in it (trails, routes, media, info etc), the word spread, and over couple of years it turned out to be pretty much the best trail riding/mapping app. And that was mostly because of the data, not the app itself, because it was frankly not very good UI-wise.
The the other shoe dropped. They locked the data and the app behind a subscription service, and not long after that, they've bundled some related web sites with it and sold it to off to some bigger company for quite a nice sum from what I've heard.
My point being, they knew about the subscription/monetization since the beginning but "forgot" to mention it (for obvious reasons). Classic bait and switch tactic. My riding buddies and me spent dozens of hours (some much more) mapping our region and added hundreds of trails and other info "for the good of everyone", just to get it locked away by them. I'm wiser after that, but this is definitely an example how to destroy a good will of a community.
As an occasional user of Alltrails, what is total garbage about it? Just curious. I don't find it as bad but perhaps I'm not using it for the same uses cases as you are.
Found it useful going to Yosemite and planning some hikes over there, especially to know recent comments.
Vtriol against AT is because it is not a trail finding, offline gps, or fitness app. It is a "lifestyle" application designed to drive pro subscriptions. Additionally, paywalling offline map access is downright evil.
the feature of all trails pro is it's unique maps you can download for data-less access.
This ^ should be illegal. Imagine you're an under-equipped tourist from boston who tries to hike Mount Washington, thinking your application surely will work offline? Nope, you gotta pay for that, and you don't know until you're lost.
I had a lot of success with Backcountry Navigator. Used it a something like 2010 to 2018 but haven't done real hiking recently. It was great for downloading topos for offline use (you could be very particular about what subsets of what maps you were downloading, and lots of map types were available) and for GPS tracking on the maps. One thing that was great was the built in GPS satellite view / compass that you could use to troubleshoot when you weren't getting good GPS.
Like many other apps, it has off-line vector map support, but it has the unique feature to create routes interactively by swiping your finger over the trail that you want to ride, and it will immediately build an elevation profile.
It's incredibly useful when you didn't plan your route up front and you want to get an idea about what's ahead.
Yeah Wikiloc started out great too (especially here in Barcelona where they're from) but became way too commercial very quickly.
Everything is online so they can make sure you've paid for it. These things all start out great but as soon as they take off the monetisation becomes priority #1 and the user #2 and of course they die off again.
How are Alltrails or Backcountry Pro garbage? I use them almost exclusively offline, and both of them offer far better functionality for less battery usage than the linked PWA.
