Wilderness Hiking Tracker – Track — Realtime route tracking & sharing Review

I used this app to keep my family informed of my location when on a wilderness hike in New Hampshire's White Mountains. The app worked best for us in "smart" mode, where my position was pinpointed by GPS. I carried my iPhone in the top of my backpack inside of a ziploc bag. My wife could see on a web page my position pretty close to real-time. She viewed the map layer that let her see elevation contours, and combined with an AMC WMNF trail map, she had a very good idea of where I was at any given time. I found the battery was used up at about 10% - 15% an hour in that mode, so it was good for roughly 8 hours of tracking. I had a small external battery charger that could recharge the iPhone overnight when I camped. Of course, the app needs cell service including data to get the tracking data uploaded to the web site, and I was in and out of cell tower range as I hiked. But my wife told me that when I was out of range, the web page just didn't update for 15 or 20 minutes, but then the track would update a bit later with all data points intact once the trail happened to carry me back into cell tower range. The app was also useful to me as I hiked, as I could see my track and compare it to the AMC trail map to see my progress. That was helpful in locating a somewhat obscure trail junction that I missed on a foggy day. It would be excellent if there was a way to import a map that fills in the details Google Maps lacks...with only Google Maps data on the iPhone, wandering in the woods basically gives you your track and blue dot over a big green blob. A dedicated URL for tracking would be nice. What I mean is that everytime you start a new track, a new URL is generated for that track. So, you have to get that URL out to whoever it is you want to track you. If you're on the fringes of cell service and that e-mail with the tracking URL gets stuck in your outbox, they can't track you. A dedicated URL would be great, because then whoever's tracking you could just bookmark "your" URL without the risk of missing the page they're supposed to be following you on because the e-mail got stuck in your phone. Now if you're on the edge of cell signal, hey - I get it. Maybe it doesn't matter. But just sayin'. All in all - this is a great app for the price. We ended up using this instead of the Spot personal locator devices that are expensive and have terrible reviews.
Review by ecbanks on Track — Realtime route tracking & sharing.