Station Walks: Trails & GPX

The app asks one question: where are you starting from. Answer with your location, a station, a stop, an address or a point on the map, say how long you have, and three loops come back described by their character, the greenest, the flattest, the shortest. If none appeal, another reshuffle is one tap away.

The point of difference is the car. Other apps route you to a trailhead car park; this one starts the loop at the railway station, the tram, the metro or the bus stop, and can return you there from anywhere on the route. Trains, trams and metros are offered first because they run on Sundays, and a bus is offered only when there is nothing else and is flagged as such.

Recorded walks never leave the phone. They go to no server, and a GPX export goes wherever you send it. Rating a route sends a few hundred bytes: the date, the rating and the tags. There is no account, no email address and no advertising tracker.

• Loops that start at a station, a stop or your front door, not a car park
• No single difficulty grade: distance, ascent and estimated time given separately
• Offline maps downloaded around the track, with position and heading without signal
• “Take me back to the station” from anywhere on the route
• Record a walk and export it as GPX, with the track never leaving the device

Walking apps are built around the assumption of a car, which quietly excludes anyone who does not have one and makes a free afternoon into a logistics problem. Starting the loop at the station instead is a small change with a large consequence: the walk becomes something you can decide on twenty minutes beforehand. The refusal to reduce a route to one difficulty grade comes from the same place, since easy means nothing to someone pushing a pushchair.

The developer has been writing native Apple software since the first public iPhone SDK in 2008. He works from Rennes, France, under SAS Corvaisier, and has published 24 apps across 7 platforms, from iPhone and iPad through to Apple Watch, Mac, Apple TV, Android, Fire TV and Roku. Everything is built natively, one platform at a time, with no cross-platform wrapper in between.