You are going to run somewhere. There will be no signal. You open the app before leaving, go to offline maps, and look for your area.
Until today, the answer was often: it isn't there.
Thirteen regions existed, built one by one, by hand, by us. If you ran inside one of them, fine. Otherwise you had nothing — and you had to write to us and ask.
What you do now
Settings → Offline maps → the button at the top right.
A map opens. You pan and zoom: you download what you see. The size shows and recomputes with every gesture. You give it a name, you press, and the bar moves.
That's it. There is no rectangle with corners to grab: with gloves on, at −20 °C, on a wet screen, that doesn't work. What the map shows is what lands on the phone.
What it actually weighs
A 70 × 70 km region around Røros: about sixty megabytes, roughly thirty seconds on a good connection. Once downloaded it asks for nothing more.
The figure shown before you press is deliberately a little larger than reality. In our measurements it announces 61 MB for 49 MB actually taken. We much prefer a pleasant surprise to the opposite: finding out that the download overruns what was announced, on EDGE, the night before a race, is not a detail.
The choice made against the obvious: no contour lines
The maps we built by hand carried contour lines. The ones you download yourself do not.
We could have kept the contours and left you waiting for us to prepare your region. We chose the opposite, and it deserves to be said plainly: hillshading replaces contours for locating yourself, not for reading an exact altitude. You will see valleys, ridges, passes, how steep a slope is. You will not read "1,240 m" off a line.
In exchange, you wait for nobody, wherever you run — Scandinavia, the Alps, Canada, the Pyrenees, Alaska.
The relief itself gained a lot. We changed source: where the old one turned Alpine slopes into mush, the new one shows gullies and ridges — and weighs four times less.
What it does not do
- This is not a safety map. Nothing on it marks thin ice, an avalanche zone, a snowmobile trail. A basemap has never said what is passable.
- Trails come from OpenStreetMap. In very remote terrain there are few — because there are few in the data, not because the app hides them.
- A region is not a route. It knows nothing about your track; it covers a rectangle.
- It is not unlimited yet. Beyond roughly 90 × 90 km the app refuses and asks you to tighten the frame. That is deliberate: past that, the download gets long enough to be abandoned halfway.
And the thirteen old regions?
They stay, contour lines and all. We will not retire them until the new system has been through a real season in the field. If we are going to change how you get your maps, we may as well keep the net.
If you lose signal mid-download
Nothing is lost. What has already been taken stays on the phone, and starting again picks up where it stopped. That is the behaviour we worked on hardest — because it is the one that actually happens, at the cabin, the night before, with one bar of signal.