I built the hiking app I wanted to carry.

I made Go Hike because of a walk that went quiet. Somewhere in the middle of a valley, with no bars at all, I opened three different hiking apps and every one of them showed me a spinner. My phone was full of a route I had already walked and not one of those apps could show it to me.

That struck me as backwards. A hiking app is used precisely where there is no signal. So I started again from the opposite end: what if the app simply never needed the internet? What if everything you wrote down was already on your phone, and stayed there?

That one decision settled almost everything else. No account, because there is no server asking who you are. No subscription, because there is nothing running that I'd need you to pay for. No feed, no followers, no leaderboard — your walking is not a competition and I have no interest in turning it into one.

What I kept is the part I actually missed: the remembering. The squirrel that came back down the same larch. The ninety seconds the cloud lifted. The bog after the second gate that ruined a pair of trail runners. Go Hike attaches the place, the weather and the temperature for you, so a year later a photo still tells you the whole story instead of half of it.

It is free, and it will stay free. I would rather a few hundred people carry something honest up a hill than build a funnel out of it.