freedomTrack 2.0: A New Look, Clearer Controls, and Tracking That Follows You to Cruising Altitude
I've been building freedomTrack, a private GPS route-tracking app for iOS and Apple Watch — no email, no account, no personal data required to start recording. Today I'm shipping version 2.0, and while it's not a rewrite, it fixes the kind of friction that only shows up once real people start using an app in ways you didn't fully plan for.
What freedomTrack still does, at its core
Run, ride, hike, ski, or walk, and freedomTrack records your route with full stats — speed, elevation, heart rate from Apple Watch — and keeps everything on your device until you decide to share it. Follow a public route someone else recorded, share your position live with a link, or just keep a private log of everywhere you've been.
What's new in 2.0
A new icon. A simplified pin-and-shadow mark, redesigned for iPhone and Apple Watch — including a circular border on the Watch icon instead of a rounded square, so it actually matches how watchOS crops and displays it.
Every action now says what it does. This is the bulk of the release. Swipe actions on your routes list, the buttons for following a guided route on the map, and the track-details action bar used to be icon-only — clean, but not obvious to everyone. They all now show text labels. The button to start a new activity is a wider "New route" pill with a gentle pulse the first time you open the app, instead of a bare circle that gave no hint it was tappable.
Fixed: the map not loading on your first run. On a fresh install, "load map on cellular data" was defaulting to off — so if you opened the app without Wi-Fi in hand, the map just looked broken. It now defaults to on, like it should have from day one.
Flights now record properly. This one came from a real bug report — a track I flew from Madrid to Palma recorded fine through takeoff, then went completely silent for 46 minutes at cruising altitude, only picking back up on descent. Turned out freedomTrack's GPS noise filter, tuned for running and cycling, was quietly rejecting every fix once the plane passed 500 km/h or the in-cabin GPS accuracy degraded past 50 meters — which is most of a flight. There's now a dedicated Plane activity type with its own relaxed thresholds, so the rest of your activities keep the tight filtering that keeps their tracks clean, and your flights stop vanishing mid-cruise.
The model stays simple
freedomTrack is free to use — local GPS tracking, stats, voice notes, and photos always are. Cloud features like live sharing, uploads, and Group Rides run on credits you buy when you need them, or an Ultra subscription if you'd rather not think about it. No account required to start.
Try it
freedomTrack is available now on iOS and Apple Watch.