Last month we were in Amsterdam, and by the end of the trip I wondered how much of the inner city we had seen. I believe there is an Amsterdam-specific app for that, but I’d like to add an app for daily tracking.
I have an iphone, which already tracks steps, but I’d like mapping as well, to see where I went.
Walking speed, etc. are also helpful.
Any favorites? Any recommendations against certain apps?
Prefer free, but don’t mind paying a small fee if there’s something which is useful.
The GPS in my car (4Runner) sucked. I mean really bad. I updated it and it still couldn’t find places and a couple of times would take you out of the way to get somewhere. The GUI was terrible. The screen was also real small.
I gave up on it. I had an extra tablet I wasn’t using. So I got a mount for that, and now just use Google maps.
I recently moved to an area I’m not real familiar with, Google maps is working great for me on it. Get directions, push start, and it shows you the way and tells you verbally when turns are coming up.
Google Maps has this built in:
It used to be a lot better when it worked in the cloud, but Google made it on device only a while back. It’s a lot slower now, sadly.
Also, the GPS on your phone uses a lot of battery. Google Maps only samples it every so often to compensate. Hiking apps can do continuous tracking, but that takes hours off the battery life.
If that’s an issue, you can get standalone GPS devices or watches. They record your route to a GPX file of waypoints and when you get home, you can plot those waypoints on any map you like.
(Just to be clear, really what you want is a location tracker. That’s a separate thing from a mapping or navigation app. A location tracking app or device records your GPS location every few seconds or minutes. It does that without mapping anything. Once you have the recorded waypoints, then many map apps can display them. In some but not all cases, the same app/device can both track and map. Then the nuance there is what kind of map you want shown, like for car use or hiking or biking etc.)
I’m an avid cyclist, hiker and walker. For the past decade I’ve used Strava, along with a Garmin watch to record my nearly daily activities. I’m packing up and heading out for a last day of the year mountain bike ride which I will record with Strava.
Before I started using Strava, I used MapMyWalk or MapMyRun. Strava is like those, but with more community. I’m friends with lots of other hikers/runners so it is fun to see their activities.
Another, simpler, way to do this is to make sure you have location saving enabled for your camera and just take a picture everywhere you go. Then you can browse them by location later: Browse photos and videos by location on iPhone - Apple Support
It’s better for your battery life since you manually record a waypoint only when you take a pic instead of on an interval.
I’ve used those for activity tracking, but how well would they work for when you’re out all day (like on vacation)? Can you lower the GPS sampling rate so it records less frequently, like Google Maps does?
I’m not sure if Strava has that capability. You can set it to auto-pause when you aren’t moving for example. My Garmin watch can record for a long time on one charge. We’ve done multi-day backpack trips and it wasn’t an issue recording each day.
I miss that Google used to do this with their phones and it saved it to your Google account. I missed the warning they were deleting all that data and never preserved it. It was years of trips just gone.
There’s two different ones I would recommend. One is Fog Of World, which will uncover a track of anywhere you go as long as you have it recording. It has the capability of being able to edit the areas uncovered in the event the GPS has a glitch, such as while inside a building with a lot of metal in the walls, in a tunnel, etc. It is updated regularly and also has really good integration with Dropbox to keep track of your data. The major drawback is that it doesn’t really distinguish separate individual tracks, it just keeps track of everything.
The other is World Uncovered. That one can record separate tracks, and will show data such as how fast you were going, your altitude, when the track was recorded, average speed, and so on. The app also does a better job of keeping more precise track of your track, that is it glitches less than Fog Of World. The problem is that the app was last updated a few years ago, and I suspect that the developer doesn’t keep up with it the way that Fog Of World is kept up with, and that one of these days it’s just going to stop working when Apple updates iOS to one that the app is no longer compatible with.
The built-in Health app logs this data. So you could scroll back to the days you were in Amsterdam and see hourly reports of what your speed was at the time. You can also check walking/running distances, not just steps. Other stuff, too, like how many flights you walked up.
Apple Maps in iOS 26 has an opt-in feature called Visited Places that will log all the places you’ve been to. It’s good for vacations because you’ll have an automatic list or map of all the restaurants, hotels, museums, parks, etc you went to. Looking at the map of all those locations could give you a nice visual of how much of the city you saw. I don’t think it tracks your routes to and from those places, though, and it’s only available in select counties at the moment.
Thanks for the input. I had seen all three of these, and it’s interesting to see what’s important for certain users.
This I do quite often, but I’m interested in seeing the map, including other statistics. I like data. 
Which reminds me, I need to make sure I get an external battery the next time I travel - Google Maps eats battery power for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I use it a lot when traveling.
Thank you! I hadn’t seen either of these. Reading about them, I have the feeling that World Uncovered would be the preferred app for my needs (as I see them now), but Fog of World is the one that’s getting updated. And Fog of World’s Privacy Policy 
:
In short, we do not collect any of your exploration data. Your data will be uploaded when you sync them with your cloud storages, but only you have access to them. We don’t.
As Switzerland, where I am, is one of the places that this is available, I’ll try this first. I use the built-in health app already. I should also see what else the health app can do, before investigating Fog of World.
But it looks like Visited Places may have some challenges before it is rolled out in the EU. Therefore it’s usefulness maybe be a bit limited.
Thank you all for the input!
Google. Especially once you get past the “bloop,” which means “mistake, yet it’s okay”, and you can continue following and tour the area, or just make a U-turn.