Bring your own map pack
Import a raster MBTiles package to render maps without a connection. The app never downloads tiles on your behalf and never bulk-fetches from public tile endpoints.
A product of Divith Technologies
Create the route. Own the file. Navigate offline.
Route Foundry is a local-first iPhone app for planning, editing, converting and navigating routes — hiking, walking, commuting, road cycling, gravel, MTB and motorcycle touring. No account, no backend, no cloud database. Routes live on your device unless you export them.
What it does
Every claim below describes behaviour that is implemented and tested. Where a feature has a limit, the limit is stated rather than omitted.
Plan
Tap the map to build a route point by point, or draw freehand with Route Pencil. Segments are routed by Apple Directions or by an offline routing pack when one is installed, or drawn straight for off-network terrain — each segment records which produced it, so one route can mix all three.
Edit
Drag points with a live preview; routed neighbours recompute on release. Split a segment exactly where you tap. Lock the parts you are happy with. Reverse, clear, delete a section, or replace a routed segment with a straight line. Everything is one undo step per action.
Order
Points are numbered on the map and in a list, counting from one, and dragging one in the list moves the route through it at its new position. Every join is recalculated when you do — the way from A to C is not the way from A to B — and the whole reorder is a single undo step.
Understand
Distance, ascent and descent, high and low points, estimated duration for the chosen activity, waypoint and section counts, and an elevation profile. A route you draw carries no height information of its own, so the profile is sampled from a terrain model and then stored with the route — fetched once, and offline from then on, including in every file you export. Ascent is measured from a smoothed, threshold-filtered profile, so a noisy GPS track doesn't report climbing that never happened.
Mark
Waypoints have real types — water, food, viewpoint, camp, hazard, parking, repair — with notes, tags, expected arrival and dwell time.
Keep
Edits autosave. Routes are stored as files under the app's own directory, with a SQLite index that exists only to render the list quickly; if that index is ever lost, the routes are rebuilt from the files at launch.
Navigate
Turn-by-turn guidance with voice and haptics, off-route detection with hysteresis, and — when a routing source is available — a drawn way back onto the route. A route in disconnected pieces is guided as the pieces it is: guidance says which section you are on, how far to the end of it, and how big the gap after it is; no distance ever counts a gap as route. Before guidance starts, a card says exactly what will and won't work without a connection.
Record
Track recording with pause/resume, one-tap waypoints, and crash-safe storage: every point is written as it arrives. A session is offered back at the next launch until it has actually been saved or discarded — including one that was stopped and then lost before it could be saved. Saving asks which activity it was rather than assuming.
Formats
The file is the product. Everything you create can be exported in full, and every picker is built from the formats the app actually implements — so it cannot offer one it can't produce.
| Format | Import | Export | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPX | Yes | Yes | Tracks (one segment per route section), routes, waypoints, elevation |
| TCX Course | Yes | Yes | Course points round-trip as cues |
| KML | Yes | Yes | One Placemark per section; waypoints as Points |
| FIT Course | Yes | Yes | Written from the published FIT protocol, not Garmin's SDK |
Route Foundry (.routefoundry) | Yes | Yes | Lossless project format, SHA-256 verified |
Not supported: KMZ, GeoJSON and PMTiles. They are not implemented and are not offered anywhere in the app.
Maps and offline use
Apple Maps is the default and is online. Offline use is built on files you already have — not on a download the app performs for you.
Every import is validated
A pack is checked for SQLite structure, the tables MBTiles requires, a declared raster format, at least one tile, and a sample tile whose bytes match its declared format. A file that fails is refused with the reason rather than installed and left rendering nothing.
Coverage is never assumed
A pack's coverage is its declared bounds, or the extent of its own tile pyramid when it declares none. When neither can be established, coverage is unknown — and unknown never satisfies an Offline Ready check.
Offline routing
Import a Valhalla tile extract to reroute without a connection. Coverage is read from the tile names inside the extract. A route outside that coverage says rerouting is unavailable rather than promising it.
Vector MBTiles are refused deliberately. A vector tile's schema isn't knowable from the file, and painting a generic style over an unknown one renders a garbled map. The map keeps its logo and attribution control, and an imported pack's own attribution text is carried into the style, so imported data is credited on screen.
Privacy, in one paragraph
There is no account, no application backend, no analytics SDK, no crash reporter and no telemetry of any kind. Nothing you do in the app is sent to us.
Stored on your device
Routes, recorded tracks and imported packs live in the app's own container, encrypted at rest by iOS. Deleting the app deletes all of it. Nothing is in iCloud or on a server.
Location, only when you ask
Used for navigation and recording only, with When In Use authorization — never Always, never on launch. Every other part of the app works with location denied, and is tested that way.
The only network calls
The Apple Maps basemap, Smart Routing (MKDirections) and
place search (MKLocalSearch). All three are Apple's own
services. Every other feature makes zero network requests.
Requirements & limits
What the app needs, and what it deliberately does not do.
Requires
An iPhone running iOS 18 or later. iPhone only — iPad, Apple Watch and CarPlay are out of scope and not shipped in a half-adapted form.
Not a substitute for judgement
Route Foundry is a planning and guidance aid. Roads, trails and conditions change; map and routing data can be wrong or out of date. Obey traffic law and signage, watch the road and the terrain, and do not operate the app while riding or driving.
Documents
Everything a customer, a regulator or App Review might ask for, on the product it belongs to.
Features
The complete list, with every limit stated next to the feature it limits.
Privacy policy
What the app collects (nothing), what leaves the device and when, and the App Store privacy details in full.
GDPR & data rights
Controller, lawful bases, transfers, retention, and each right answered one by one.
Licence terms (EULA)
Your agreement with us, including the Apple-specific terms App Review requires.
Support & FAQ
How to report a problem so it can be fixed, the common questions, and the known limitations.
Contact
A person, by email — for support, privacy requests and security disclosure alike.
Need help, or found a defect?
Support is handled by email, by the people who built the app.