A running app that works offline

GPS does not need a phone network and never has. The satellites are overhead whether or not you have bars, so Waypath records a run in airplane mode, in a valley with no coverage, or abroad with data switched off, exactly as it does in a city. Time, distance, pace, elevation gain and heart rate from the Watch are all computed on the device. Smart filtering that drops bad fixes and speed spikes runs on the device too.

The Apple Watch app records on its own, with no phone nearby, and syncs when the phone is back in range. Once an activity is finished it is on your phone, and it exports from there as a GPX 1.1 file, network or not.

Waypath draws its maps with Apple's MapKit. Tiles you have looked at recently are usually still in the phone's cache, so a route you planned at home often draws fine on the trail. Tiles you have never loaded will not appear until there is a network, and you will see a grey grid where the map should be. The track line, your position and every number on the screen keep working on top of that grid.

There is no “download this region” button, and this page will not pretend otherwise. MapKit has no public way to pre-download a region, pin it so it is not evicted, or even report whether a tile came from cache. A download button built on that would be a promise the phone could break in your pocket, three days into a trip, in the mountains. Proper offline basemaps mean licensing and hosting vector tiles, which is a real project with a real bill, and it is on the list. Until then the honest statement is: it records anywhere, and it tells you when the map cannot follow.

Partly. A route you saved before leaving stays on the phone, and following it with your planned line under your track and a drift warning does not need a network. The catalogue of 426,029 waymarked trails, condition reports, clubs and messages do need one: they are fetched from the server when you open them. Save the trail you intend to use before you lose signal.

Live sharing pauses without a network, because positions have to reach the browser holding the link. The recording continues and sharing resumes when the signal does.

If a downloadable map is what you need, be clear-eyed about it. Komoot sells map regions as one-off purchases and its Apple Watch app has had phone-free offline navigation since January 2026. AllTrails Plus, at $35.99 a year, downloads areas for offline use. Strava's offline maps are part of its $79.99 a year subscription. Garmin watches carry maps on the device on many models. Runkeeper, Nike Run Club and Runna: not verified, and none of them is sold on offline maps.

So for a multi-day trek in a place with no coverage, Komoot or AllTrails will draw a better map than Waypath today. For recording the run, all of them, and Waypath, do the same thing, because GPS is GPS.