Changelog

User-visible changes, newest first. For internal refactoring / version-bump-only builds see the private repo.

1.40.2 — June 6, 2026 — Elevation recording fix

• Fixed a bug on phones without a barometer where vibration (e.g. mountain biking) could drag a recording’s elevation steadily downward to impossible values — elevation now stays anchored to genuine GPS readings.
• Physically impossible elevations (below −500 m or above 9000 m) can no longer be recorded, whatever their source.

1.40.1 — June 5, 2026 — Recording stats card fixes

• The live recording stats card now keeps its clock current even while a recording is paused.
• Smoother performance on long recordings — the live stats now recompute only while the card is open.

1.40.0 — June 4, 2026 — Live recording stats card

• Tap the recording timer to open a live stats card — duration, distance, current elevation (with its source), total ascent, and the clock, all updating as you go.
• Pause, Finish, and Delete are now clear icon buttons, each with a confirmation.
• The recording menu and the other map menus now match: rounded, translucent, and they follow your in-app Text size setting.

1.39.1 — June 4, 2026 — Map-return and User Guide fixes

• Fixed an occasional black map when returning to the map from a menu — it now redraws immediately instead of staying blank until you panned.
• The offline User Guide text now scales with the in-app Text size setting, like the rest of the app.

1.38.0 — June 3, 2026 — Adjustable text and control sizes

• New Text size slider in Settings → Appearance (50–150%) that scales all in-app text on top of your Android font setting.
• New Map controls size slider — resize the on-map buttons, compass, and record pill; shrink them to reclaim map area on a small phone.
• The waypoint-size setting is now a smooth slider too.

1.37.15 — June 2, 2026 — Waypoint elevation works offline

• Adding a waypoint on the map now pre-fills its elevation from your current GPS altitude, so it works in flight mode or with no signal. You can still edit it, or fetch the precise value later when online.

1.37.14 — June 2, 2026 — New recordings start with no activity

• A new recording no longer defaults to “Hiking” — it starts with no activity selected (shown as “None”), so you choose the right one yourself. Existing tracks are unchanged.

1.37.13 — June 1, 2026 — Optimize shows a path preview

• The Optimize dialog now shows a before/after path preview (faint original, bold optimized result on top) so you can see the straightening before you save.

1.37.12 — June 1, 2026 — Optimize cleans canyon GPS noise

• Optimize now cleans the track before simplifying — it smooths noisy altitude and straightens the GPS “scribble” you get in deep canyons, while preserving real switchbacks. Validated against a barometer watch on a canyon hike. Preview and Save-as-new still keep your original safe.

1.37.11 — June 1, 2026 — Crop: Save as new

• Track Crop now offers Save as new (like Optimize) — keep the cropped version as a separate track and leave the original untouched.

1.37.10 — June 1, 2026 — Accurate ascent and descent

• Fixed wildly inflated total ascent/descent on phones without a barometer (one canyon hike showed +17,000 m instead of ~2,250 m). The figure now denoises the elevation before adding it up, the way Strava and Komoot compute gain. Applies to all stored and imported tracks.

1.37.5 — May 21, 2026 — GPS Diagnostics overlay (optional)

• New opt-in GPS Diagnostics overlay (Settings → Advanced) showing live fix quality, accuracy, and altitude-source detail — useful for understanding tricky-signal recordings.

1.37.0 — May 17, 2026 — Barometric altimeter and better elevation

• On phones with a barometer, ApexGPS now uses it as the primary altitude source — sub-metre stable and free of GPS noise and canyon dropouts.
• Ascent/descent now uses a 5 m threshold (the Strava/AllTrails standard); existing tracks will show smaller, more realistic numbers.
• Plus a series of accuracy improvements for phones without a barometer — multiple altitude sanity-checks and smoothing to reject GPS spikes, and an optional GPS-accuracy field in exported GPX.

1.36.0 — May 17, 2026 — Better canyon recording

• Recording now captures more points in canyons and tight terrain (raw capture with smarter density gates), so deep-canyon descents aren’t lost.
• New Clean GPS jumps option in Optimize for tidying noisy tracks after the fact.

1.35.2 — May 15, 2026 — Reliable recycle-bin · Trash icon now appears only while dragging · Tapping near midpoints works

• The recycle-bin icon is now drag-only — it appears the moment you long-press a vertex or midpoint, glows red on hover, and disappears on release. Before, the icon was always visible in measure and planning modes but the long-press-drag-to-delete gesture wasn’t obvious to most users — they saw the bin but couldn’t figure out how to get a point into it. Now the bin appears only when you’ve actually picked up a point, making the affordance clear.
• Dropping a midpoint on the recycle-bin now reliably deletes it. Two intermittent bugs fixed: (1) release-position jitter sometimes left the drop-coordinates a few pixels outside the trash zone even when the icon was glowing red — now the rendered red glow itself is the signal, so if you see red on release, the point deletes; (2) on a few occasions a midpoint dropped on the trash would stay visually parked at the icon area until the next list change — now the line cleanly snaps back to the original shape on every abort.
• Tapping the line near a midpoint dot no longer warps the existing segment. Before, if you tried to tap the line to add a new vertex but landed near the midpoint dot between two existing vertices, the existing segment would distort — your tap got hijacked into a near-zero drag that inserted a vertex right at the midpoint. Now the tap is recognised as a tap and a new vertex is added to the end of the list, exactly like tapping anywhere else on the map.

1.35.1 — May 15, 2026 — Recycle-bin fixes · Track planning starts where you tapped

• The recycle-bin trash now works when the map is rotated. Before, dragging a measure pin or planning vertex onto the top-right trash icon silently failed if the map had been rotated by any amount — the icon wouldn’t glow red and dropping wouldn’t delete. The hit-test now reads raw finger coordinates instead of the rotated map’s internal frame, so the trash works at any orientation.
• Deleting the first measure pin in follow-me mode no longer destroys the next pin. When measuring with follow-me on, the first pin (pin A) auto-tracks your live location. Trashing it used to fail in a confusing way: A appeared to come back on the next GPS fix, and the pin you’d put right after it (B) silently disappeared. Now trashing A keeps A gone for the rest of the measure session, and B + every other pin stay put. Toggle measure mode off and on to re-seed A at your current location.
• Track planning no longer auto-places vertex 1 at your current location. Planning is a deliberate map-area workflow — most users pan to the area they want to plan in, then enter plan mode. Auto-seeding vertex 1 at your GPS location surprised users planning remote routes. Planning now starts empty; the first tap places vertex 1 exactly where you tapped, wherever you’ve panned the map.

1.35.0 — May 14, 2026 — Share visible tracks & waypoints · Battery saver at speed · GPX from chat apps

• Share everything visible on the map with one tap. A new share icon sits in the top-left of the map, just to the left of the ☰ menu. Tap it and a sheet opens listing every visible track + waypoint inside your current viewport. Tick what you want, tap Share, pick WhatsApp / email / Drive — the whole bundle goes out as a single .gpx file named after the area you were viewing (e.g. ApexGPS-Wadi-Bani-Khalid-2026-05-14.gpx). Two more entry points use the same sheet: a Share visible card on the Maps menu (uses the viewport you had open when you opened the menu), and a share icon in the top bar of Tracks / Waypoints lists when you long-press to select multiple — bundles the selected items directly with no extra sheet.
• Battery saver at high speed. A new toggle in Settings → Advanced (default on) reduces GPS sampling from once-a-second to once-every-10-seconds when you’re moving faster than 36 km/h — driving, on a train, on a fast e-bike. Road tracks still record cleanly; lane-level accuracy is reduced during driving. Cuts roughly half the GPS battery drain on the highway leg of a road trip with no visible loss of route shape. Toggle off if you need full sampling at speed.
• Tap-to-open .gpx files from WhatsApp / Telegram / Signal / Outlook. Before, attachments from these apps fell back to the system text viewer because they advertise the file as generic application/xml instead of the canonical GPX MIME type. ApexGPS now also accepts those generic types — single-tap a .gpx attachment in any messaging app and the system “Open with” menu shows ApexGPS as a first-class option.
• Recipe-mode offline-map backups (cross-platform). Settings → Data → Backup replaces the single “Saved map regions” checkbox with a three-way picker: None / Recipe (small — lists which regions to re-download, works cross-platform with the iOS port) / Full tiles (the old behaviour — embeds the raw tile bundles, large but offline-restorable, Android-only). A recipe backup is around 80 KB even for a dozen regions; restoring one drops placeholder rows in Maps → Saved offline maps with a Download button to fetch the actual tiles on demand.
• Paid map style hides itself without a key. The Outdoors (Thunderforest) entry now disappears from the map-style picker and from the Download Offline Region picker until you’ve pasted an API key under Settings → API Keys. Before, picking it without a key silently fell through to OpenTopoMap with no explanation. Paste a key → the entry reappears in both menus.

1.34.2 — May 14, 2026 — Hide paid tile sources without a key

• The “Outdoors (Thunderforest)” style now hides itself entirely until you’ve pasted an API key. Before, picking it without a key silently fell through to OpenTopoMap with no explanation — you tapped Outdoors, saw OpenTopoMap tiles, and wondered why. The map-style picker and the Download Offline Region picker both omit the Outdoors entry until Settings → API Keys → Thunderforest has a saved key. Paste a key → Outdoors reappears immediately in both menus.

1.34.1 — May 13, 2026 — Backup format v2 (offline-region recipes, cross-platform)

• Backups can now skip the heavy tile bundles and store a “recipe” instead. Settings → Data → Backup replaces the single “Saved map regions” checkbox with a three-way picker: None / Recipe (small — lists which regions to re-download, works cross-platform with the iOS port) / Full tiles (large — the old behaviour, Android-only). A recipe backup is around 80 KB even for a dozen regions; the equivalent full-tile backup could be 50–500 MB. Restore a recipe-mode backup and the saved-maps list fills with rows marked “Not downloaded yet · X tiles” plus a Download button — tap it to re-download from the original tile server (uses your current cache + a brand-new tile fetch for the rest).
• A backup made on Android can now be restored on iOS and vice versa — for everything except full-tile bundles. Tracks, waypoints, settings, and region recipes all round-trip cleanly. The full-tile bundle mode is still Android-only because iOS doesn’t ship an MBTiles consumer, but the recipe mode covers most users’ practical needs (rebuild on the new phone, accept a short re-download for the regions you care about).
• Restoring an Outdoors-style recipe nudges you to set the API key first. If a restored recipe targets Thunderforest and you don’t have a key saved, tapping Download shows a one-time toast directing you to Settings → Advanced → Thunderforest API key; once the key is there, the download starts normally.

1.34.0 — May 13, 2026 — Sizing polish · Water Sports · Live restore progress · Plural correctness

• Waypoint markers are about 25% larger by default. “Normal” (1.0×) now renders at the size the prior “Large” did. If your waypoints feel too small, the picker still has Small / Normal / Large / XL — open Settings → Appearance → Waypoint size and switch back to Normal (existing setting kept; you may want to step down one notch since the whole ladder is bigger now).
• Crop track sliders — the round handles work from any point now. Before, only the vertical line of each crop handle was draggable; tapping the round knob at the bottom often did nothing because the touch area didn’t extend all the way down. Fixed — both round handles now grab from anywhere on the circle plus a small slop band below.
• New activity type: Water sports. Pick it from Track details → Activity to tag paddle, sail, surf, kayak, or any other water session. Same wave-and-water-surface icon as the Waterfall waypoint symbol.
• Restoring a backup now shows live progress. A large backup (hundreds of tracks, thousands of waypoints) used to lock the app on a spinner for several minutes with no indication it was working — easy to mistake for a crash and force-close. The Restore button now sits above a progress bar + “Restoring track N of M…” / “Restoring waypoint N of M…” caption that ticks per track and every 100 waypoints, so you can see the import is healthy and how far it has to go.
• Polish & Arabic now show correctly-pluralised count labels. 13 strings that show counts (“X tracks”, “Y waypoints”, “Z minutes ago”, “saved 12.4 km · 4,200 points kept”, etc.) finally route through proper plural rules. Polish gets its full 4-form set (1 trasa / 2 trasy / 5 tras / 1,5 trasy); Arabic gets all 6 (zero / one / two / few / many / other). English / German / French / Spanish were already grammatically correct but the underlying machinery now routes through the same path for consistency.

1.33.8 — May 10, 2026 — Measure tool & route planner first-pin queue

• Tap the measure tool or planner FAB before your GPS fix is ready and the first point now auto-drops as soon as your location lands. Previously, tapping while GPS was still warming up left an empty start — you had to tap the map manually to drop pin A. Now the app shows “Acquiring GPS fix…” on the toggle and queues the first-point auto-place; once the fix arrives, pin A appears at your current location and the live tracker takes over normally. Mirrors the same queue behaviour the recording FAB got in 1.33.7. Manually tapping to drop a pin meanwhile cancels the queue, so you never lose a tap.

1.33.7 — May 10, 2026 — Tolerant GPX import · Privacy in About · Recording auto-start

• Imports of GPX files with malformed coordinates no longer fail outright. A track-point or waypoint with a malformed lat / lon value used to abort the entire import. The app now skips the bad point and keeps importing the rest — one bad point in a 10,000-point hike no longer loses the file. Hard upper limits (10K tracks, 100K waypoints, 500K points per track) still throw to prevent out-of-memory.
• Privacy policy directly under Settings → About. A new “Privacy policy” row sits beneath User Guide; tap it to read the policy in-app, no internet needed. The same content is mirrored at apexgps.duttra.de/privacy.html (the Play Store privacy URL) for anyone who wants to read it before installing.
• Tap Record before your first GPS fix and the recording auto-starts when the fix arrives. Previously, tapping Record before any fix had been received started an empty-breadcrumb track immediately — if you tapped Stop before any fix arrived, you’d save a track with zero points. Now the toast says “Acquiring GPS fix…” and the recording auto-fires the moment the first non-null fix lands — no second tap needed.

1.33.6 — May 9, 2026 — Trash drop-zone reliability fix

• Track-planning and measure-tool trash drop-zone now works reliably after the app is minimised and resumed from Recents. A latent issue made the “drag a vertex over the trash bin to delete it” gesture silently stop working after the app’s window detached and reattached (minimise → tap from Recents). The drop-zone bounds got stuck at their pre-minimise coordinates while the live map position kept updating, so drops never registered. The hit-test now reads bounds fresh on every drag event (and only when the trash icon is actually attached to the window), so the drop-zone keeps working through any number of resume cycles. No app-restart workaround needed any more.
• Internal: build cleanups for the Play Store production review. Bumped a UI dependency (androidx.activity:activity-compose 1.9.3 → 1.10.1) to resolve the “edge-to-edge may not display for all users” Vitals warnings flagged on the 1.33.5 review — pure cleanup, no behavior change. Native debug-symbol extraction enabled for release builds (no-op today since the only native libs in the AAB ship pre-stripped by Google, but auto-activates if a future dep ever ships symbols).

1.33.5 — May 7, 2026 — Adjustable map-tile cache + welcome hike on first install

• Choose how much disk to allow for the map cache. Settings → Offline cache now has four presets: 250 MB / 500 MB (default) / 1 GB / 2 GB. The new cap takes effect immediately — no restart. Saved offline regions are stored separately and aren’t counted, so changing this value never deletes a region you’ve explicitly downloaded.
• A welcome hike on every fresh install. A real recording of the Watzmann Traverse (Berchtesgaden, Germany) — Wimbachbrücke → Watzmannhaus → Hocheck → Mittelspitze → Südspitze → Wimbachgrieshütte → Wimbachbrücke, ~22.6 km loop / +2250 m / about 10–12 h on the move — is auto-imported the first time you open the app. Three landmark waypoints come along (Wimbachbrücke trailhead, DAV Watzmannhaus, Watzmann-Mittelspitze). Existing installs are untouched. If you delete the samples and want them back later, Settings → Data → Load sample data re-imports them on demand.

1.33.4 — May 5, 2026 — Permissions tidy-up for the Play Store listing

• Cleaner permissions on the Play Store page. Removed a leftover “USB storage” permission declaration that was never used — the app caches map tiles in its own internal storage, not on USB / shared storage. The Play permissions summary now shows four fewer entries; nothing changes on your phone.

1.33.3 — May 4, 2026 — Correct sea-level elevation + cleaner track screen + follow-me bug fix

• Stats-bar elevation now reads true sea-level metres. On most Android phones the GPS chip reports altitude relative to the ellipsoid — a smooth math model of Earth — not the actual ocean. In the Persian Gulf that’s about 30 m off; standing on Abu Dhabi corniche showed roughly −27 m instead of zero. The app now uses the device’s mean-sea-level value when available (Android 14+ on supporting hardware) and falls back to a bundled global geoid correction (1° EGM96 grid, ~128 KB) on devices that don’t supply it (Vivo X300 Pro is one). Sea level now reads +0 m to a couple of metres, anywhere in the world, regardless of phone. Same correction is applied to the share-location text and the elevation passed to the weather forecast.
• Stats-bar speed pins to 0 km/h when you’re standing still. Previously, GPS jitter at standstill would spike the speed reading to 1–3 km/h despite no actual movement. The display now shows zero until you exceed your phone’s reported speed-accuracy floor — the recording itself still uses the raw value, so slow legitimate motion isn’t masked.
• Cleaner recordings in canyons and built-up areas. Three new defenses against multipath altitude spikes (where a wall reflects the GPS signal): the recording filter now drops altitude readings whose vertical-accuracy is poor, rejects hard jumps over 50 m vs the previous good fix regardless of the elapsed time, and keeps its rate gate sharp even after long no-altitude stretches. A May-3 Wadi Hijr canyon trace had eight one-second altitude jumps of 70–300 m slip through the previous filter; the new layers catch them.
• Track detail screen — simpler layout. The toolbar’s pencil icon is gone — tap the track name in the toolbar to rename. A single row of three buttons sits below the elevation chart: Crop · Optimize Track (X pts) · Delete Track. The previous full-width button stack and the 3-dot overflow menu are both removed; everything fits on one phone screen without scrolling.
• Optimize is now preview-then-save. Confirming the optimization in the dialog used to commit immediately with no undo. Now the simplified track renders in the chart + stats card underneath a small dialog that shows 3214 → 500 points · 12.40 → 12.30 km. Save writes it; Discard (or hardware-back) drops it. No DB changes until you Save.
• Follow-me FAB: tap once to re-lock. A bug where panning the map (which dimmed the follow-me FAB) and then tapping it required two taps to make the FAB go solid blue — the recenter animation was being misread as a continued user pan. Now one tap re-locks and recenters, as it should always have.

1.33.2 — Apr 30, 2026 — Refreshed map look + bug-fix sweep

• Cleaner, more modern map screen. The top bar, Layers / Measure / Follow-me FABs, the Record button, the stats bar, and the weather chip are now translucent — the map shows through faintly behind them so the screen feels less boxed-in. The map itself now extends edge-to-edge from the very top to the very bottom of the screen.
• Modernised menus. The hamburger menu (top-right) and the Layers tile-source picker now appear as rounded popup cards with leading icons, instead of the flat rectangles they were before. Tap targets are larger; the active tile source is marked with a bold name + checkmark.
• Arabic / Persian / Urdu — Western digits everywhere. Distances, elevations, coordinates, share-location notification times, and the weather sheet’s hourly clock no longer render as Eastern-Arabic numerals (٣٫٤ كم) — they read as 3.4 km regardless of phone language. This was a long-standing inconsistency in the chart labels and a few notification builders.
• Arabic charts: scrub gestures in the right direction. The track-detail and planning elevation charts had inverted scrubbing in Arabic — touching the visual left edge jumped to the end of the route. Now the scrub follows your finger correctly regardless of language.
• Hardware-back from the elevation Save / Discard preview now discards the preview instead of silently navigating away and dropping the unsaved fetch. The preview bar mirrors the planning-mode “are you sure?” pattern.
• Backup → restore now preserves your recorded tracks’ start time, stop time, and activity tag. Imported GPX tracks were already covered (they don’t carry these fields anyway); recorded tracks were silently losing all three on every restore. If you’ve restored a backup since the activity-tagging feature shipped and noticed your hikes / rides lost their badges — that’s why. Take a fresh backup now and the next restore will keep them.
• Translation completion (de / fr / es / pl / ar). Eleven strings around the elevation-fetch flow (“Fetching elevation…”, “Save”, “Discard”, “Couldn’t fetch elevation”, etc.) and the chart scrub tooltip (“Touch chart to explore”) are now translated. Previously these were English-only on non-English phones.
• Misc tightening. Several “Track saved” / “Acquiring GPS fix” status messages now appear as quick toasts (~2 s, don’t block the map) instead of bottom snackbars (~4 s, blocked taps). The recording / follow-me service start path was hardened against a rare race that could log a “service didn’t start” warning. Track planning’s elevation fetch is faster on long routes (the per-batch network connections are now reused).

1.33.1 — Apr 28, 2026 — Sort polish + fetch elevation for old tracks + ESRI default

• Re-tap a sort row to flip the direction. In the Tracks and Waypoints lists, tapping the active sort row now reverses the order — Newest first flips to Oldest first, Name (A→Z) flips to Name (Z→A), Nearest first flips to Farthest first, Most points flips to Fewest points. The active row shows the directional name plus a ✓. Tapping a different row picks that key’s natural direction; re-tapping then flips it. No separate asc / desc switch — keeps the menu compact.
• Sort and filter your tracks by activity. The Tracks list gains a fifth sort key: Activity (alphabetical — Cycling, Hiking, Offroading, Paragliding, Running, Walking). Tracks with no activity assigned sink to the bottom in A→Z (and float to the top in Z→A) so you can spot what still needs tagging. The filter menu also gains an Activity section — six chips for the activity types plus a “No activity” chip — so you can isolate “show me only my hiking tracks” or “show me everything I haven’t tagged yet.”
• Tap to fetch elevation for tracks that don’t have any. GPX files from some sources don’t carry per-point altitude, so the track detail used to show an empty elevation chart. Now: if a track has no elevation, the chart area is replaced with a Tap to fetch from terrain card. One tap pulls altitude from a worldwide terrain model (about 30 m accuracy, no account required) for every point of your track. While loading you’ll see an X / Y progress count and a Cancel button. When it finishes, the chart renders against the new altitudes — but they’re not saved yet: a Save / Discard bar appears so you can preview the result and back out if it looks wrong.
• ESRI Topo is the new default basemap on fresh installs. Existing installs are untouched — whatever you’d picked under Settings → Map style sticks. For someone installing the app for the first time, the map opens on ESRI Topo instead of OpenTopoMap. ESRI’s tiles render cleaner labels at hiking zooms, especially on iPhone-class displays. The picker order in Settings is unchanged; switching back is one tap.
• Planning: easier to grab a vertex, more reliable trash drop. Touch targets on the planning vertices and midpoint handles got a real ~28dp circular hit-area (was the bare icon rect — finger-misses were common on dense routes). The trash drop-zone got a small slop margin on every edge, and the “did you drop on the trash?” check now uses the marker’s actual position at drag-end, not a sometimes-stale “is hovering” flag. Net effect: the trash bin no longer “stops working” after a few vertices, and grabbing the right vertex on a long plan is reliable.

1.33.0 — Apr 27, 2026 — Plan a track on the map

• New: track planning. Sketch a route by tapping points on the map and save it as a regular Track — useful for scouting tomorrow’s hike, marking a connector you spotted on a paper map, or just drawing the loop you remember. Open menu → Tracks and tap the new + button (above the import-folder button). The map opens in planning mode: tap to add numbered teal stops, long-press a stop to drag it, long-press the small dot between two stops to insert a new one. Drag any stop onto the trash icon (top-right, below the compass) to delete it — the line reconnects through the remaining neighbours. The trash glows red when a stop is hovering over it.
• Elevation profile for planned routes. While planning, tap the chart icon on the right to see a real elevation chart for your draft. The app samples your route every ~100 m and asks Open-Meteo for the terrain altitude at each sample, then shows total ascent and descent. Long routes are sampled coarser so the fetch stays quick; you’ll see a X / Y progress count and a Cancel button while it loads.
• Save the plan. Tap ✓ Save in the top bar, name your route, confirm — the planned track lands in your Tracks list, exportable as GPX, comparable against a future recording. If you’d loaded the elevation profile, the saved track carries the dense sampled points; if not, just the stops you tapped (with elevation to fill in later if you want).

1.32.4 — Apr 27, 2026 — Crop dialog fix for Arabic

• Crop track dialog now works in Arabic. Previously, opening a track’s crop dialog in Arabic showed no visible track until you dragged the sliders inward. Fixed: the chart’s coordinate frame and slider drag handlers now stay consistent regardless of locale.

1.32.3 — Apr 27, 2026 — One-tap elevation for waypoints

• Fetch elevation from terrain. When you’re editing a waypoint, the Elev (m) field now has a small download icon on the right. Tap it and the app fills in the elevation from a worldwide terrain model (about 30 m accuracy) using the latitude / longitude you’ve typed. Useful when you’re typing a waypoint by hand, or after dragging one to a new spot. The icon is greyed out until you have valid coordinates entered; it shows a brief spinner while fetching, and a quick “Couldn’t fetch elevation” message if you’re offline. Whatever you’d already typed in the field is replaced — you explicitly asked for it.

1.32.2 — Apr 26, 2026 — Weather on by default + full translations + Maps back-button

• Weather is now on out of the box. The forecast chip and “Weather here” line on waypoints are visible without having to flip a setting first. You can still turn weather off under Settings → Weather if you’d prefer no network calls — existing installs keep whatever you already had.
• Full translations for the weather feature. All weather text — the chip, the sheet (current panel, 24-hour strip, humidity / pressure trends, 7-day strip, sunset / UV / pressure / dewpoint labels), the Settings rows, and the User Guide chapter title — is now translated into German, French, Spanish, Polish and Arabic. Weather condition labels (“Light rain”, “Thunderstorm + hail”, “Partly cloudy”, …) follow the standard meteorological vocabulary in each language.
• Maps menu: back button now collapses an open card before leaving. When Download new map area or Saved offline maps was expanded, pressing back used to skip the Maps menu entirely and dump you back on the map. Now back closes the open card first; one more press takes you to the map. This matches how the back button already worked elsewhere (Settings sub-screens, multi-select on the tracks / waypoints list).

1.32.1 — Apr 25, 2026 — Weather: small fixes

• Correct sun / moon icons through midnight. The 24-hour weather strip used to show moon glyphs against the next day’s afternoon hours (11:00, 14:00, 17:00) when you opened the sheet late at night. Each hour now picks its own day’s sunrise / sunset, so daytime hours always show the sun-side icons.
• Waypoint forecast actually uses the waypoint’s elevation. When a peak waypoint sat at virtually the same coordinate as your current GPS reading, the cached current-location forecast was sometimes returned for the waypoint instead of a fresh elevation-aware fetch. On a 1480 m summit that meant the forecast was running ~9 °C too warm. The cache now keys on elevation as well as coordinates, so the waypoint’s stored height is always honoured.

1.32.0 — Apr 25, 2026 — Weather: per-point polish, no map overlays

After 1.31.0 went out, the gridded weather overlays didn’t pass the eye test on hiking-zoom maps — they read as blocky colour squares with no real terrain alignment, and the bottom row of controls (overlay slider + chip + speed / elevation / distance bar) ate too much screen. This release strips the map back and doubles down on the per-point sheet, which is where the useful detail lives.

• Map overlays removed. No more precipitation radar or cloud-cover overlays on the basemap, no time slider. The Settings → Weather screen shrinks to a single master toggle.
• Richer per-point sheet. The weather sheet (tap the chip or a waypoint’s “Weather here” line) now shows: hero current panel with weather emoji, temperature, “feels like”, wind / humidity / dewpoint / pressure / UV / sunset; a 24-hour strip with hour-by-hour weather icons + temperature; a humidity trend (light blue) and a pressure trend (green); and a 7-day strip with high / low + icon. Designed to fit on one screen on a typical phone.
• Per-waypoint elevation is sent to the forecast. Waypoints with a stored elevation field now feed it to the forecast model, so summit forecasts use the real summit height instead of the model’s coarse averaged elevation. Same for the chip’s current-location forecast — it uses your GPS altitude.
• Chip aligns with waypoint card. The stats-bar chip text now matches what you see when you tap a waypoint: emoji + temp + wind. A thin separator was added between the chip and the speed/elevation/distance row so they read as one panel.

1.31.0 — Apr 25, 2026 — Weather

ApexGPS now shows hiking-grade weather information from free public APIs, fully opt-in.

• Forecast chip in the stats bar. Once you turn weather on in Settings → Weather, a small chip above the speed/elevation/distance bar shows current conditions for your GPS location: temperature, wind, humidity. The chip updates every 15 minutes when online and tells you when the data is stale or you’ve gone offline (greys out and adds a clock).
• Tap-to-expand sheet. Tap the chip (or the new “Weather here” line on a waypoint panel) for the full breakdown — current readings, the next 24 hours as a temperature line + precipitation bars chart, and a 7-day strip with high/low temps and weather icons.
• Manual refresh. A ↻ button in the sheet header forces a fresh fetch when you’ve reconnected after a flight-mode patch.
• Animated map overlays. A new Overlays section in the Maps hub adds two independent toggles: precipitation radar (animated colour-coded rain, past 2 hours plus a 30-minute nowcast) and cloud satellite (infrared cloud-tops, geostationary). These don’t send your location anywhere — they’re pure tile fetches, independent of the weather chip.
• Privacy first. The whole feature defaults off. Forecasts come from Open-Meteo and radar from RainViewer; both are free public APIs that don’t require an account or an API key. Your location is only sent when you explicitly enable the chip.

Read the full chapter under Settings → User Guide → Weather.

1.30.2 — Apr 25, 2026

• Compass tap respects the rotation lock. Long-press the compass to lock the map’s rotation; while locked, a single tap on the compass no longer snaps the map back to north. (You’d have to long-press again to unlock first, then tap.) This restores the lock’s intent — freezing the angle against accidental input, including a stray tap on the compass itself.
• Shorter, less intrusive notifications. The “Deleted …” / “Moved …” / “Arrived” / follow-locked / auto-paused-location-off messages now show as a brief Android Toast (about 2 seconds, system overlay) instead of a 4-second snackbar that blocked the bottom of the map. You can tap another waypoint immediately after deleting one without waiting.

1.30.0 / 1.30.1 — Apr 25, 2026 — Recording quality

First post-1.29 hike (4 h 10 min, 9.98 km) revealed that the live track recording was storing far more points than necessary and had absorbed a large false elevation drop from a stuck altitude reading. Both fixed:

• Lighter, smoother recordings. A new filter only keeps a fix if you’ve moved at least 5 m, 15 seconds have elapsed, or the elevation changed by 3 m+. Wild fixes with accuracy worse than 25 m are dropped outright. On the test hike: ~4600 → ~1500 points stored, no visible change to the trail line, distance accuracy unchanged. Less storage; smaller GPX exports; the same trail.
• No more false elevation ditches. Some Android devices’ fused location provider gets stuck and reports the same cached altitude (e.g. 139 m on a hike at 1200 m) for minutes at a time. The recording now treats those readings as “no value” rather than persisting the wrong number. The elevation profile shows a clean gap across the bad window instead of a dip to zero, and the climb / descent stats reflect only real altitude changes.
• MSL altitude on Android 14+. Where available, the recording uses the more honest mean-sea-level altitude reading instead of the WGS84 fallback that’s prone to the stuck-cache behaviour above.

If you have a recording from before 1.30.0 with a wrong elevation reading, you can re-record it — but the on-track display in the app will use the persisted points. There’s no migration step.

1.29.0 — Apr 24, 2026

• Live track recording. Tap the red dot at the top-left of the map to start recording your current trip. A live HH:MM:SS timer replaces the dot; tap it for Pause / Finish / Delete. Your path draws as a red line on the map as you move. On Finish the recording is saved as a new Track and the overlay opens automatically so you can review distance, ascent, and elevation profile right away.
• Crop Track. On the track detail screen, Crop Track opens a dialog with a mini-map preview and two draggable handles on the elevation chart. Trim a bad start (no GPS fix yet) or a stray tail (forgot to hit Finish) without losing the rest of the track. Destructive — a confirmation step tells you exactly how many points you’ll drop.
• Activity tag per track. The Track detail screen has a new Activity picker: Hiking · Walking · Running · Cycling · Offroading · Paragliding. Recordings default to Hiking; imported tracks start unset.
• Waypoint elevation. The waypoint edit sheet has a new optional Elev (m) field — fill it in when you want to carry an altitude for a known summit / pass / etc. Blank = no elevation stored (same as today’s imported waypoints without elevation data).
• Track detail + waypoint edit refreshed. Grouped Cards, section overlines, icons on every row, activity-specific icon on the Activity chip, red-outlined Delete to match the destructive action, new Points stat on the track screen. Waypoint edit is tighter — the whole form now fits above the system nav bar on most phones without scrolling.
• Process-death recovery. If Android ever kills the app mid-recording (low memory, force-stop), the breadcrumb is preserved. Re-open the app and the recording comes back in a paused state — resume, finish, or discard.
• Battery saver: adaptive GPS cadence. While recording with the screen off, GPS fix cadence relaxes from 2 s to 10 s to save battery. The moment you unlock the phone it’s back to 2 s for live smoothness. Fully automatic.
• System-location guard. Tapping record when your Android system-wide location toggle is off now shows a message with a Settings shortcut instead of silently starting a dead recording.
• No-fix hint. If you tap record before GPS has acquired a fix, a short “Acquiring GPS fix…” notice tells you why the breadcrumb hasn’t started yet. Recording begins as soon as the first fix lands.
• Removed: the opt-in panic button. The top-left area now belongs to the record chip.

1.28.0 — Apr 24, 2026

• App now available in Arabic. العربية joins German, French, Spanish, and Polish alongside English. All six languages in Settings → Appearance → Language. Every screen, every menu, the offline User Guide, the website — all translated.
• Waypoint-overlay labels now translated. Tapping a waypoint on the map used to show “Elev 145 m · Dist 0.42 km” in English regardless of the app language. Now it switches with the UI language (e.g. “Höhe 145 m · Dist 0.42 km” in German, “ارتفاع 145 م · مسافة 0.42 كم” in Arabic).
• Numbers stay in Western digits in every language. Coordinates, distances, altitudes, bearings — all render as 25.165, 145, 0.42, etc. regardless of UI language. Matches the convention used by Google Maps, WhatsApp, and every modern Arabic app.
• On the compass and in shared coordinates, N/E/S/W stay Latin — international GPS/aviation convention.
• Map tile labels (place names) continue to reflect OpenStreetMap’s native-script data for each region — Arabic for Arab-world areas, Latin elsewhere. Independent of the UI language.

1.27.0 — Apr 23, 2026

• App now available in four new languages. German, French, Spanish, and Polish, alongside English. Every screen, every dialog, every menu — all translated. Pick your language in Settings → Appearance → Language, or leave it on System default to follow your phone's language.
• Translated user guide. All 11 chapters of the in-app User Guide (Settings → About → User Guide) are translated into the same four languages. Offline and online — the “View online” link at the bottom of the guide takes you to the matching language version at apexgps.duttra.de/<lang>/docs/.
• Language survives a backup restore. Your chosen language is included in the Settings category of the backup ZIP. Restore on a new phone and you land in the right language without having to find the picker again.
• Stats bar now translated too. The SPEED / ELEV / DIST labels at the bottom of the map (and km/h / m units) now switch with the UI language. German shows TEMPO / HÖHE / DIST, Spanish shows VEL / ALT / DIST, and so on.
• Italian and Arabic are next. Italian follows the same pattern as French. Arabic adds right-to-left layout, which needs a dedicated visual audit before it ships.

1.26.2 — Apr 22, 2026

• Thunderforest API key now encrypted at rest. The key you paste in Settings → Advanced is now stored in an Android-Keystore-backed vault, not plaintext. Existing keys migrate automatically on first launch. Backups that include your settings will carry the key in the ZIP (needed for portability) — a new red warning appears in the backup dialog when this applies, so you know to keep the ZIP private.
• Backup restore is safer. Restore now rejects ZIPs attempting directory traversal, caps entries at 100 000, per-entry size at 500 MB, and total uncompressed size at 2 GB. Crafted / malformed backups can’t fill your storage or escape the backup directory any more.
• Cancel button on backup. While a backup is running you can now hit Cancel under the busy button to abort without waiting.
• GPX import progress. A Importing GPX… snackbar is shown while large imports are in progress, so the app no longer appears frozen during a big load.
• Location service more reliable on Android 14+. The GPS foreground service now starts correctly on Android 14 and 15 (previously silently killed in some edge cases). Wake-lock scope tightened — should improve battery drain during long tracking sessions.
• Tile preview fix + background hygiene. The saved-offline-maps detail preview now loads without blocking the UI. Internal: tile download service can no longer ANR on shutdown. Release builds no longer leak debug log output.
• Removed: the Buy-me-a-coffee link in Settings → About. ApexGPS remains free with no ads, no tracking, no cloud.
• Internal (for curious users): Room DB now ships with explicit migrations (1→2→3); upgrades preserve your tracks and waypoints even if a schema bump lands. Downgrade wipe still applies — sideloading an older APK over a newer one will reset the DB.

1.26.1 — Apr 22, 2026

• Saved offline map detail — fixed skewed preview. The map preview on Menu → Saved offline maps → [tap a region] was painting tiles past its own bounds, overlapping the stat rows and the “Show on Map” button. The preview now clips correctly to its 1.6:1 rectangle.
• In-app “View online” link in Settings → About now points at apexgps.duttra.de/docs/ (the rendered user guide) instead of the raw GitHub tree view.
• Buy me a coffee. New Support section in Settings → About. ApexGPS stays free with no ads and no tracking — if it’s useful to you, a small tip helps keep new features coming.

1.26.0 — Apr 21, 2026

• Offline User Guide. The full 10-chapter guide is now bundled inside the app — open Settings → About and tap any chapter to read without an internet connection. Links between chapters work in-app; taps on external links open your browser.
• Load sample data. New button in Settings → Data loads 3 example waypoints (Summit / Viewpoint / Trailhead) and 3 tracks of different lengths and elevation profiles. Lets you try every feature of the app without needing your own GPX files. Safe to delete later — they’re just normal tracks/waypoints after import.
• Navigate auto-enables GPS. Tapping Navigate on a shared location or waypoint now turns live location on automatically if it was off. No more “Acquiring GPS…” stall when you actually wanted to start navigating.
• Map panning unlocks follow-me again. A regression from earlier 1.2x builds: under continuous GPS updates the map kept snapping back to your position every second even after you’d dragged it. Drag the map → camera unlocks (FAB turns mid-blue) as before; your triangle keeps updating in place.
• Waypoint symbols that used to crash. Importing a GPX that contained Viewpoint / Saddle / Waterfall / Picnic / Drinking water / Guidepost / Ruins / Toilets symbols could crash the app on render. Fixed — all 32 symbols render correctly now.

1.25.x — Apr 21, 2026

• Import GPX from the Tracks list (top-right folder icon). Same for the Waypoints list. The map’s Import FAB is gone — list screens own imports now.
• Add waypoint by coordinates — blue “+” in the Waypoints list opens the full waypoint edit sheet with empty Lat/Lon fields. Type coords or paste a lat, lon string into Latitude (auto-splits).
• Edit a waypoint’s coordinates. Lat and Lon are now editable in the waypoint edit sheet, with inline validation (lat ∈ [-90, 90], lon ∈ [-180, 180]).
• Follow-me FAB moved to the bottom of the map’s right-hand column — closest to your thumb. Layers is above it, Measure above that.

1.24.x — Apr 19, 2026

• Full-screen navigation compass. While navigating to a target, tap the 🧭 icon on the nav strip to open a big analog compass: distance / ETA / speed / elevation up top, a rotating dial with the blue needle pointing at the target, and lat/lon/bearing/accuracy below. Drag down to minimise. See Share → The navigation compass.
• Share a waypoint. Waypoint overlay now has a Share button next to Navigate and Edit. Sends the waypoint via any messaging app; recipients with ApexGPS open the link directly as a shared location they can Save.
• Cleaner nav strip + stats bar. The nav strip now shows bearing + ETA (bearing in blue — it updates live), distance lives in the stats bar’s DIST field. No more duplicate numbers stacked on top of each other.
• Needle on the compass emerges smoothly from the centre pivot (subtle visual polish).

1.23.0 — Apr 19, 2026

• Navigate to any waypoint straight from the waypoint overlay. Tap the walking-person icon next to Edit — same light-blue dotted line + live distance/bearing + auto-stop at 20 m as shared-location navigation. See Waypoints → Navigate to a waypoint.

1.22.2 — Apr 19, 2026

• User guide link in Settings → About. Opens this documentation in your browser.

1.21.0 — Apr 19, 2026

• Follow-me: pan freely. Dragging the map no longer fights the GPS — the triangle keeps updating, but the map stays where you put it. Tap the location button to re-center. Long-press to turn GPS off instantly. Three visible states (off / locked / unlocked) so you always know what the map is doing.
• Compass-to-north animates smoothly instead of snapping. Less jolting when rotating back to north.

1.20.0 — Apr 19, 2026

• Navigate to a shared location. When someone shares a location with you via an apexgps.duttra.de link, tap the Navigate button on the bottom bar to draw a light-blue dotted line from your position to theirs with live distance and bearing. Auto-stops when you’re within 20 m. See Share → Navigate to a shared location.
• Visual cue for shared locations. A red bullseye marker appears at the shared spot so you can see exactly where it is on the map. [Save] it as a waypoint or [Dismiss] to clear.

1.19.0 — Apr 19, 2026

• Waypoints list: filter + sort. Filter by colour or symbol, sort by date / name / nearest. Matches what Tracks already had. See Waypoints → The Waypoints list.
• Share message format cleaner — labelled URLs (ApexGPS: / Google Maps:) with a blank line above for readability.

1.18.x — Apr 19, 2026

• Share your current location. Tap the blue position triangle on the map → info panel with elevation, accuracy, time, battery → Share via WhatsApp, SMS, email, etc. Full flow in Share & navigate.
• App Links. Shared locations from ApexGPS open directly in the app on devices that have it installed, complete with a red marker at the spot.
• Web fallback — if the recipient doesn’t have ApexGPS, the shared link opens a web page with a map preview + a button to open in Google Maps.

1.17.6 — Apr 18, 2026

• Maps hub redesign. Downloading a new area and browsing saved offline maps now live on one screen as expandable cards. See Offline maps.
• Rotation black-corner fix (when you rotate the map, no more black triangles at the edges).

1.16.0 — Apr 17, 2026

• Settings reorganised into sub-screens (Appearance / Storage / Data / API Keys / About) with inline help.
• Waypoint size setting (Small / Normal / Large / XL) in Appearance.
• Start with rotation locked option — if you hate accidental map rotations, lock it at launch.

1.15.0 and earlier

• Core app: GPX import, tracks list, waypoints with 32 symbols, offline map downloads, compass + rotation, distance measurement, backup/restore to ZIP, track optimization.

For bug-report-level detail or developer context, see the private code repo — contact the developer for access.