Settings

menu → Settings is organised into five sub-screens: Appearance, Storage, Data, API Keys, Advanced. Each has an ⓘ info button next to group headers explaining what the feature does.

Appearance

Theme

Default map

The tile style used when the app launches. Six options; see The map screen → Map layers for details on each. You can still switch styles mid-session via the layers button on the map. Fresh installs default to ESRI Topo (clean labels at hiking zooms); existing installs keep whatever you’d previously selected.

Text size

Slider, 50 %–150 % in 10 % steps. Scales all in-app text — menus, lists, the stats bar, dialogs. It applies on top of your phone’s system font-size setting rather than replacing it, so it never overrides an accessibility choice you’ve made system-wide; it just nudges ApexGPS up or down from there. Default is 100 %. Use it if a large system font overflows the menus, or if you want bigger text in ApexGPS specifically.

Map controls size

Slider, 50 %–150 % (same steps as Text size). Resizes the on-map buttons (the main buttons, compass, and recording pill). Shrink it to reclaim screen space on a small phone where the controls feel like they crowd the map; grow it for easier tapping with gloves. Buttons never shrink below a comfortable tap target. Default is 100 %.

Waypoint size

Slider, 50 %–200 %. A multiplier on top of the automatic zoom-adaptive size — markers already shrink at low zoom and grow at high zoom so they stay readable; this setting nudges the whole range up or down. Default is 100 %. (Before 1.38.0 this was a Small/Normal/Large/XL picker; it’s now a slider for finer control.)

Track line width

Slider from thin to thick. Heavier lines are easier to see when many tracks overlap; thinner lines look cleaner at high zoom. Default is a medium width.

Start with rotation locked

Storage

Cache usage

Total size of the browse tile cache + per-tile-source breakdown.

Map tile cache size

Pick how much disk to allow for auto-cached map tiles: 250 MB, 500 MB (default), 1 GB, 2 GB. The new cap takes effect immediately on the next tile fetch — no app restart needed. Saved offline regions live separately and are not counted against this limit, so changing the cache size never deletes a region you explicitly downloaded.

Clear cache

Browse tile cache rebuilds as you look at areas with signal. Clearing doesn’t hurt data you’ve explicitly saved via the Maps hub download feature.

Data

Backup

Create a ZIP containing tracks, waypoints, saved offline regions, and settings. Toggles let you exclude categories. Saved offline regions have a three-way mode: None (skip them) / Recipe (small — just the instructions to re-download each region, works cross-platform between Android and iOS) / Full tiles (the old behaviour — embeds the raw tile bundles, large but offline-restorable, Android-only). See Backup & restore.

Restore

Open an existing apexgps-backup-*.zip file. Choose Merge (add to existing) or Replace (overwrite existing). See Backup & restore → Merge vs Replace.

Optimize all tracks

Runs Douglas-Peucker simplification across every imported track. Reduces point counts without visibly changing the track shape. Useful if you’ve imported lots of heavily-detailed GPX files and the map feels sluggish on an older phone. Shows the total count that’ll be touched.

Individual tracks can also be optimized one-at-a-time from the track detail screen.

Load sample data

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. Three landmark waypoints at canonical real-world coordinates: Wimbachbrücke trailhead (628 m), DAV Watzmannhaus (1930 m), Watzmann-Mittelspitze (the Hauptgipfel at 2713 m). Auto-imported on the first launch of a fresh install; this button re-imports it on demand if you’ve deleted it and want it back. The samples are just normal tracks/waypoints after import — delete them any time.

API Keys

Thunderforest

Required to use the Outdoors (Thunderforest) tile style. Free “Hobby” plan: 150,000 tile requests per month, no credit card. Sign up at thunderforest.com, copy your API key, paste it here → Save.

Without a key, the Outdoors style is hidden from the map-style picker (and from the Download Offline Region picker) so you don’t accidentally pick it and see OpenTopoMap fallback tiles. Paste a key → the entry reappears in both menus. The other five styles work without any key.

Advanced

Battery saver at high speed

When you’re moving faster than 36 km/h (≈22 mph) — driving, on a train, on a fast e-bike — the app drops its GPS sampling cadence to one fix every 10 seconds instead of one per second. Road-shaped tracks still record cleanly; lane-level accuracy is reduced during driving. Cuts roughly half of GPS power draw on the highway leg of a road trip with no visible loss of route geometry. Toggle off if you need full sampling at speed (e.g., rally telemetry).

About

Settings → About shows the app version, attributions, and contact email — plus the User Guide: tappable entries for every chapter of this documentation, bundled with the app so the full guide works offline. Tap a chapter → a reader opens and renders the chapter in-app. Cross-chapter links inside each page are honoured; back arrow returns to the chapter list. A “View online” link at the bottom opens the same docs at apexgps.duttra.de/docs in your browser. For help, contact sandwalker.one@proton.me.

Below User Guide, a Privacy policy row opens the same in-app reader on the privacy chapter — no internet needed to read what data the app collects (none beyond what’s on your phone) and how it’s used. The same content is mirrored at apexgps.duttra.de/privacy.html for anyone who wants to read it before installing.

Related: FAQ → · Backup & restore →