GPX Reader

GPX Reader does one thing well: hand it a GPS track from a ride or a hike, and it draws it on a map. It opens those files straight from Safari, Dropbox or iCloud, and runs on the iPhone, iPad and Mac. It was a small paid utility — a personal project I kept going from 2012 to 2019, through a long line of iPhones and iOS versions.

Whatever your device recorded

The name says GPX, but the point was to open whatever a GPS device or service had saved — in whatever format it used. It drew tracks, routes and waypoints on Apple Maps, and let you switch to satellite or hybrid to read the terrain underneath. It also read Garmin's TCX files and a few rawer formats — LOC, and even the raw NMEA a receiver spits out — so a track from an old eTrex or some phone app opened the same way a clean GPX did.

However you kept them

Most people didn't keep their tracks in a tidy place. They were links in an email, files in Dropbox, exports sitting in iCloud — so GPX Reader opened from all of them. Tap a GPX link in Safari or hand a file over from any other app, and it loaded. iCloud's document browser kept everything in one place across devices, and Handoff let you start with a track on your phone and pick it up on the iPad or the Mac without hunting for it again.

Seven years of small releases

A $1.99 utility doesn't make anyone rich, but I kept GPX Reader going for seven years — from the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 up to multi-window on the iPad in iOS 13. A lot of those updates came straight from people who emailed me: a missing distance label, or a custom colour for the track. It was the kind of small, finished thing I like building — one job done properly, for the handful of cyclists and hikers who, like me, just wanted to see where they'd been.