Someone sent you a trail.
A friend tapped share on a good route and it landed in your chat as a file. Here is what to do with it, and what it does and does not carry.
Opening a trail is free. No account, no sign-up, and no Pro. Install TrailFree, tap the file, and the route is yours to follow.
Opening one
Tap the .gpx file in the chat and pick TrailFree. The app shows you the shape of the route first, on the map, so you can see where it goes before you keep it. If it looks like your kind of day, add it to your trails and it sits there ready to follow, offline, whenever you head out.
From then on it behaves like any trail you drew or imported yourself: draw it on the map under your own route, follow it with turn-by-turn cues if you have Pro, or simply use it to see where the path goes.
Passing one on
Open an outing you were pleased with and tap share. You get two things to send:
- A picture of the map with the outing's name and its three headline numbers, drawn on your phone. Good for a group chat where nobody wants a file.
- The trail itself, as a standard GPX file the other person can open in TrailFree or any other app that reads them.
The message carries a plain link to trailfree.app so whoever receives it knows what to open it with. No part of the route is encoded in that link.
What a shared trail carries
Handing someone a route is also how a stranger could learn where you live and when you leave, so the shared version is built rather than copied.
- Positions only. The shape of the route, and nothing else. No times, no dates, no heart rate, no elevation. The sharing path returns a positions-only type, so nothing else is able to travel with it.
- Both ends trimmed. A set distance comes off the start and the finish, so what you post is a trail rather than your front door and the hour you set off. Choose off, 100 m, 200 m or 500 m in Settings; it is 200 m unless you change it.
- Still a trail. A short outing is never trimmed back to nothing. The trim shrinks to fit rather than leaving something too small to follow.
Once the file reaches the app you chose, that app's terms apply to it. TrailFree has no copy and no say in where it goes next. The full detail is in our privacy promise.
This is not a social network
There is no feed, no profile, no follower count and no leaderboard. Nothing you record is visible to anyone unless you tap share on that one outing, and there is nothing in the app that nudges you to. The idea is passing on a good route to someone who asked, the way you would send a photo.