Show HN: Treeline – beautiful, powerful wilderness topo maps for iOS(apps.apple.com)

apps.apple.com

Show HN: Treeline – beautiful, powerful wilderness topo maps for iOS

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/treeline-maps-topo-trails/id6761303613

Hey HN!

I really love hiking, camping, and backpacking, and I try to get out into the middle of nowhere as much as I possibly can. I could never leave on a trip without a good topo map downloaded.

Over the last couple years, though, I've gotten pretty fed up with the existing options when it comes to offline maps. Gaia is expensive and buggy; CalTopo is ugly, dated, and battery-sucking (the map is an embedded webview); AllTrails isn't fully-featured enough for serious backcountry trips; OsmAnd is ugly and lacks some basic features for the backcountry. Several major players have been purchased by private equity and are just getting worse.

I hate to be this critical of tools that have obviously had a lot of love and care put into them, but they haven't kept up with the times, and I really think the outdoor recreation community deserves better.

So Treeline is my attempt to build that. It has all the major features of Gaia et al. It has a fully custom basemap (with style inspiration from NPS and USFS maps - I think it's quite pretty!), offline downloads, POIs (campsites, water, etc.), detailed point info, search, navigation, route recording, saved features, 20+ useful layers, and a lot more.

You can download maps for offline use and access all the overlays for $18/year flat. That price is lower than any comparable app, and it will stay fixed through at least 2027.

I intend to implement pretty much every feature that people rely on in other outdoor mapping apps - although Treeline works well now, and I've used it on trips myself, this is just a start. I want it to be the mapping app of my dreams, and ideally of yours, too.

Two major caveats:

- Private land ownership data is expensive, so that will not be coming immediately. (The Public Lands layer lets you see inholdings, though.)

- Map data is US-only for now. Because the basemap is fully custom, changes require a long rebuild, and it turns out that the Earth is massive. I'm expanding to the rest of North America this week, with the rest of the world to follow.

I'm planning a web client for route building, and Android will follow if there's interest.

Please check it out and let me know what you think! Out now on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/treeline-maps-topo-trails/id67...

1 comments

alexthehurstvor 16 Tagen

This is impressively full-featured for a new app. I tried it out for some route-planning and tracking a hike and kept finding the features I was looking for. Can you share anything about your development approach?

I tested it out for route planning and it seems very nice. I’ll be following along!

Feedback:

- Bug report: on my phone, the “measure distance” tool sets the marker far away from the crosshairs, about halfway to the top of the screen. This makes it impossible to set the first point accurately. - bug report: in an area near me, the base map contains two separate overlapping (slightly differing) sets of contour lines. - feature request: when planning a route, it would be big to be able to drag the route anchors and add/remove anchors, rather than just removing the latest anchor.

Thanks for this app!