Hiker Apps

Glympse is an application that specializes in real time location sharing. A free version is available with features that are sufficient for hikers.

Glympse is a fast, free, and simple way to temporarily share your real-time location with anyone. The tracking is based on GPS, is temporary and secure – and Glympse recipients don’t need to download an app to see the shared location - they will instead receive a link which they can open in any web browser, on their computer or mobile. The web page in the browser will display a map with approximately the last kilometer of the shared trail.

AGPS-TrackerOm is an interesting and quite a robust Android application. It's main function is to follow preloaded tracks and record your tracks, and tries to do so reliably - ensuring that the GPS data is recorded at all times, even when the phone goes into stand-by mode. This means you shouldn't get surprise straight lines in your GPX tracks. It can also provide enhanced accuracy of your current elevation, by using altitudes from NASA-generated Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) instead of the GPS-provided elevation which can be quite inaccurate.

AGPS-TrackerOm (previously called A-GPS Tracker++), differs from the lighter version, A-GPS Tracker in the following:

  • AGPS-TrackerOm uses offline maps maintained by OpenStreetMap, which you need to preload. The "lighter" A-GPS Tracker uses Google maps which are not available offline.
  • You can download Digital Elevation Models (DEM) which allow the app to display altitude contour lines and provide DEM altitude along with GPS altitude, the former being more accurate