The best hiking trail app for Android in 2026 is AllTrails for finding trails with honest community reviews, Gaia GPS if you navigate real backcountry, and Wikiloc if you want a huge library of community-recorded routes with free offline maps. All thirteen picks below were verified as live on Google Play with 2025–2026 updates, and each entry states what it actually costs before you commit.
In short: the top three
- AllTrails – still the best place to answer “where should I hike this weekend?” with half a million mapped trails, recent photos, and reviews. Just be careful with the auto-renewing trial, and note the new, more expensive Peak tier on top of Plus.
- Gaia GPS – the serious navigator for off-trail and backcountry work, with USGS topos, land-ownership layers, and offline downloads. Pay for it only if you actually leave maintained trails.
- Wikiloc (new pick) – tens of millions of real GPS-recorded routes worldwide and free offline topo downloads. The strongest free-leaning option for finding and following routes other people have actually walked.
Why this matters in 2026
The hiking-app market consolidated hard since our 2024 roundup, and several apps on the old list no longer deserve a spot. ViewRanger was switched off in 2022 and folded into Outdooractive. FATMAP shut down on October 1, 2024 after Strava absorbed it. Sygic Travel was rebranded into Tripomatic, which is now a city planner rather than a hiking tool, so we dropped it. Meanwhile Hiking Project, once the great REI-backed free option, has been in slow decline since onX bought its parent company in late 2020.
The money picture changed too. AllTrails added a Peak subscription above Plus, PeakVisor raised its prices in June 2025, Gaia GPS pushes auto-converting trials, and Komoot was bought by Bending Spoons in March 2025 with layoffs and pricing churn. The good news is that genuinely free options got stronger: Wikiloc, HiiKER, and Organic Maps all give you free offline maps, which most paid apps still lock behind subscriptions. Offline maps and wrong-turn alerts are now table stakes; treat anything that needs a live signal as unsuitable for the trail.
The picks
1. AllTrails
Price: Free with ads; AllTrails Plus about US$35.99 per year (region dependent) after a 7-day trial that auto-converts; a newer AllTrails Peak tier sits above Plus at roughly US$80 per year and adds route creation, heatmaps, and 3D maps.
The default answer for most hikers, with 50 million-plus Android downloads and close to 500,000 mapped trails. The strength is discovery: recent photos, condition reports, and reviews from people who actually hiked last week. Offline maps, wrong-turn alerts, and live sharing sit behind Plus. Complaints cluster around the silent trial-to-billing transition and feature nudges toward Peak — read the trial terms before tapping subscribe.
Verdict: The best all-rounder for trail discovery and trip planning. Best for: casual to regular day hikers who want trail ideas with trustworthy recent photos.
2. Gaia GPS
Price: Free tier with limited maps and no offline downloads; Premium about US$45 per year billed annually (a 14-day auto-converting trial); Premium with Outside+ is US$89.99.
Gaia is the app mountain guides and search-and-rescue teams carry, because it goes where AllTrails ends: USGS 1:24,000 topos, slope-angle shading, snow and avalanche layers, and public-versus-private land boundaries. Downloads are genuinely offline and printable. The free tier is mostly a demo, and reviewers note it can feel sluggish on older phones with big map caches.
Verdict: The most trustworthy navigation app for real backcountry. Best for: off-trail hikers, backpackers, and anyone whose route leaves maintained paths.
3. Wikiloc (new pick)
Price: Free core; Premium roughly US$20–30 per year for navigating other members’ routes, the route planner, weather, and live tracking.
Wikiloc is a giant library of GPS-recorded routes — the developer claims over 77 million trails — built by people who actually walked, rode, or climbed them. Downloading topographic maps for offline use and following your own recorded routes is free, which already beats most rivals. Premium unlocks offline navigation of the wider community catalog. Where AllTrails suits popular, well-reviewed trails, Wikiloc shines for finding routes nobody wrote a guidebook about. Reviews in 2026 complain the paywall now bites when you want to send routes to a watch or GPS device.
Verdict: The best route library for finding real recorded tracks, with a genuinely useful free tier. Best for: hikers exploring unfamiliar regions, especially Europe and Latin America, plus anyone who wants free offline topos.
4. Komoot
Price: One region free forever; one-time region packs from US$3.99 to US$8.99, World Pack US$29.99; a newer Premium subscription (roughly €60 per year) adds multi-day planning, live tracking, and weather.
Komoot remains the best turn-by-turn voice navigation for hiking, cycling, and trail running, and its route planner picks surfaces suited to your activity rather than dumping you on a road. Since Bending Spoons bought it in March 2025 and cut most of the staff, pricing and features have churned: officially the one-time packs still exist, but new-account features like device sync are increasingly steered into the subscription.
Verdict: Excellent navigation and route planning, but check what the subscription now gates before buying packs. Best for: hikers who want spoken directions and multi-sport use, with the strongest coverage in Europe.
5. HiiKER (new pick)
Price: Free with offline map downloads and route planning; PRO+ from about US$49.99 per year (first-year discounts lower it regionally).
HiiKER has quietly become one of the best-value hiking apps, and The Great Outdoors magazine awarded it Best in Test in 2026. Over 100,000 trails are vetted against official park and trail-organization data, offline downloads are free on the free tier, and route planning handles long-distance multi-stage hikes. The map catalog — Ordnance Survey, Harvey, Swiss Topo, IGN, USGS — is what you would normally subscribe to AllTrails or Outdooractive for. The trade-offs are a smaller community and a less polished feel than the market leaders.
Verdict: The best budget route planner with genuinely free offline maps. Best for: UK and European hikers who want OS-level mapping without an AllTrails subscription.
6. Outdooractive
Price: Free; Pro about €2.50 per month (billed annually); Pro+ about €5 per month.
Outdooractive is the app ViewRanger’s users were pushed to when it closed, and it inherits that role: officially approved routes, huge tour databases tied to regional tourism bodies, and official topo maps in 25 countries including Ordnance Survey, Swisstopo, and IGN. Free users can browse and plan but need Pro for offline maps. Its route catalog is strongest in the Alps and German-speaking Europe; navigation is competent but less fluid than Komoot’s.
Verdict: The best choice for officially vetted routes and European alpine hiking. Best for: hikers in Europe who want trail-warden-approved tours rather than crowd-sourced guesses.
7. PeakVisor
Price: Free with daily limits; PeakVisor Pro US$39.99 per year or US$9.99 per month after the June 2025 price rise (previously US$29.99).
Point your camera at a ridgeline and PeakVisor names the peaks, using AR plus a database of over a million mountains. Around that party trick it has grown a genuinely useful 3D terrain viewer, offline topo maps, peak-bagging challenges, and GPX export. Pro is required to identify more than a handful of peaks per day and for offline 3D maps, and the app is power-hungry on long days out.
Verdict: A specialized but superb companion app rather than a full navigator. Best for: peak baggers, alpine hikers, and anyone who keeps asking “which mountain is that?”
8. Organic Maps (new pick)
Price: Free, open source, no ads, no account, no tracking; funded by donations.
Organic Maps is the hiking-adjacent app on this list that costs nothing and phones home to nobody. Built on OpenStreetMap by the team behind the old Maps.Me, it now includes contour lines, elevation profiles, hiking and cycling layers, GPX import and recording, and full offline navigation with Android Auto — all free. Data quality depends on the community, so popular regions are excellent and remote ones thinner. It is not a trail-discovery app; treat it as a privacy-respecting offline base map and backup navigator.
Verdict: The best fully free offline map app to pair with a discovery app like AllTrails. Best for: privacy-conscious hikers, budget users, and anyone who wants a no-account backup navigator.
9. TrailForks
Price: Free; Trailforks Pro with Outside+ (about US$35–40 per year) unlocks advanced layers, Garmin sync, and premium map access.
Built by the Pinkbike community, TrailForks remains the definitive database for mountain biking — over 780,000 routes with condition reports maintained by local trail associations, closures, and trailhead directions. It covers hiking and running too, but hiking is not the reason anyone reaches for it. The app is actively maintained (version 2026.6.0 at the time of writing), though some Android users have hit offline-rendering bugs that took months to fix.
Verdict: Unmissable for mountain bikers, optional for hikers. Best for: hikers who share trails with bikes and want current closure and condition reports.
10. Hiking Project
Price: Free.
Hiking Project deserves a mention mostly as a caution. It remains on Google Play with a deep free database of US trails and offline-capable maps, but development has visibly slowed since onX absorbed its parent Adventure Projects in 2020 — the Android app sits at about 3.6 stars, with 2026 reviews reporting login loops that redirect to onX accounts and offline behavior that has degraded. It is not dead, but it is no longer the app we recommended in 2024, and onX clearly puts its energy into the paid onX apps.
Verdict: Free and still functional in the US, but in maintenance mode. Best for: nothing that AllTrails or Gaia does not do better in 2026.
11. MapMyHike
Price: Free; MVP subscription US$29.99 per year (or US$5.99 monthly) for coaching and advanced stats.
MapMyHike is a fitness tracker first and a trail app second. It records your route, pace, distance, calories, and elevation, offers audio coaching and live location sharing, and syncs with Garmin and other wearables. Trail discovery and mapping are basic — this is not a navigation tool. Under Armour has been trimming its connected-fitness ecosystem (connected-shoe support ended in March 2025), so development is slow and the interface shows its age.
Verdict: Fine if you want calorie and pace logging on familiar trails. Best for: fitness-focused hikers who already use the MapMy family and want stats over maps.
12. Weather Underground
Price: Free with ads; optional annual premium removes ads and adds smart activity forecasts.
Weather Underground is our weather pick because it pulls conditions from over 250,000 personal weather stations, giving genuinely hyper-local forecasts and radar that airport-based apps miss — useful when a trailhead microclimate differs from the city forecast. It is free with ads, and reviewers note the radar can lag, so refresh before relying on it for a lightning call.
Verdict: The best free hyper-local weather companion for hike planning. Best for: checking trailhead conditions and sudden-storm risk before you leave.
13. First Aid: American Red Cross
Price: Free, no ads.
Not a trail app, but the one we recommend everyone carry. The official Red Cross first aid app works fully offline, was updated in 2025 to the latest First Aid/CPR/AED guidelines, and covers everything from blisters and heat exhaustion to snakebites, with a hospital finder and a CPR metronome. It costs nothing and takes minutes to install.
Verdict: The best free safety net to install before your first hike, not your hundredth. Best for: every hiker, especially anyone going solo or into areas without signal.
How to choose
- Casual day hiker who wants ideas: AllTrails free tier, upgrade to Plus only if you hike in poor-signal areas.
- Route library and free offline maps: Wikiloc or HiiKER before paying anyone.
- Real backcountry or off-trail navigation: Gaia GPS premium; skip it if you stay on maintained paths.
- Mountain biker: TrailForks is non-negotiable; treat the rest as optional.
- European or alpine hiking: Outdooractive or Komoot for official, vetted route networks.
- Budget of zero: Organic Maps plus the free tier of Wikiloc or AllTrails covers planning and navigation.
One practical rule: whatever you choose, download the maps for the area at home. No hiking app works without signal unless you prepared in advance, and signal is exactly what disappears on the trail.
FAQ
What is the best free hiking app for Android?
Organic Maps is the only fully free option here with no limits at all. Wikiloc and HiiKER both offer free offline map downloads and free route following, with subscriptions only unlocking other members’ routes and premium map layers. AllTrails’ free tier is useful for browsing but blocks offline maps.
Do hiking apps work without cell service?
Yes, if you download the maps in advance: every paid app on this list (AllTrails Plus, Gaia Premium, Komoot packs, Outdooractive Pro) supports offline maps, and Wikiloc, HiiKER, and Organic Maps offer free offline downloads. Do this at home on Wi-Fi — downloads can fail partway in the backcountry.
Is AllTrails Plus worth it in 2026?
At about US$35.99 a year, Plus is worth it if you regularly hike where signal drops and want offline maps, wrong-turn alerts, and live sharing. The newer Peak tier at roughly US$80 a year adds route creation and heatmaps; casual hikers can skip it. Watch the 7-day trial — it auto-converts to an annual charge unless you cancel through Google Play at least 24 hours early.
Which hiking app is best for navigation versus discovery?
AllTrails wins for discovering trails and judging conditions from photos and reviews. For turn-by-turn navigation while moving, Komoot and Gaia GPS are stronger. For following routes other people recorded, Wikiloc is unmatched. Serious hikers typically run one discovery app and one offline navigation app rather than a single tool.
Final verdict
For most Android hikers in 2026 the practical setup is two free apps: AllTrails to find and vet a trail, and Wikiloc or Organic Maps for offline maps you never pay for. Spend money only when your hiking outgrows them — Gaia GPS if you go off-trail or into the backcountry, Komoot or Outdooractive if you hike regularly in Europe, TrailForks if you also ride. Avoid anything that demands a subscription for basic offline maps, cancel trials through Google Play rather than by uninstalling, and keep the Red Cross first aid app installed no matter what. The tools got more consolidated and more expensive in the last two years, but the free options also got genuinely good.
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Last reviewed: September 6, 2026
