Support

No. Route Foundry has no accounts, no sign-in and no backend. There is nothing to register and no password to lose. Your routes are files on your iPhone.

Three separate things have to be in place, and the app tells you which are:

• The map. Apple Maps is online. For offline rendering, import a raster MBTiles pack under Settings → Offline Maps → +, then make it active.
• Routing. Smart Routing uses Apple and needs a connection. Offline, either import a Valhalla routing pack or draw segments manually.
• Guidance. Works offline once the map and route are on the device. Before navigation starts, a preflight card states exactly what will and won't work without a connection — read it rather than guessing.

Planning, editing, importing, exporting and recording work offline regardless.

The app never downloads map or routing data on your behalf, and it never bulk-fetches from public tile endpoints. You supply a raster .mbtiles file you already have — generated yourself, or obtained from a source whose licence permits it.

Import it with Settings → Offline Maps → +. Every import is validated before it is accepted; a file that fails is refused with the reason rather than installed and left rendering nothing.

The refusal message names the reason. The common ones:

• Vector tiles. Vector MBTiles are refused deliberately — a vector tile's schema isn't knowable from the file, and a generic style over an unknown schema renders a garbled map. Use a raster pack.
• Not a valid MBTiles file. It must be SQLite, with the tables MBTiles requires, a declared raster format, and at least one tile whose bytes match that declared format.
• PMTiles or KMZ. Not implemented, not offered.

A pack's coverage comes from its declared bounds, or — when it declares none — from the extent of its own tile pyramid. When neither can be established, coverage is unknown, and unknown never satisfies an Offline Ready check.

This is deliberate: the app will not claim to cover a route it cannot prove it covers. Note also that coverage is a bounding-box test — a pack with holes inside its box would still pass, so check the map visually for the area you actually care about.

Two different causes, and the app distinguishes them:

• "Routing pack couldn't be loaded" — the file is a tar, but the routing engine refused it. It probably isn't a Valhalla tile extract.
• Rerouting unavailable for this route — the pack loaded, but your route falls outside its coverage. Coverage is derived from the tile names inside the extract; an extract that doesn't follow Valhalla's naming has unknown coverage, and the app then declines to promise offline rerouting rather than failing mid-ride.

Location is requested only when you start navigating, start recording, or tap the locate button — never on launch. The app asks for When In Use, never Always.

If you deny it: planning, editing, import, export and the map all still work. Recording is the one feature that cannot, and it says so rather than failing silently.

Guidance and recording continue with the screen locked, which is why the app declares the location background mode. That session exists only while you are actively navigating or recording.

No. Every point is written as it arrives, so a recording survives a crash or a force-quit. At the next launch the session is offered back — paused, with its points intact — and it keeps being offered until you have actually saved or discarded it. That includes a recording you stopped but never got round to saving.

One limit worth knowing: only the most recent session awaiting a decision is offered for recovery. Older orphans stay on disk until deleted.

Export in GPX, TCX Course, KML, FIT Course, or the native .routefoundry package. The native format is lossless, documented, versioned and SHA-256 verified — it stores the complete document.

There is no lock-in and no server-side copy to request, because none exists. Deleting the app deletes everything it holds.

The FIT writer is built from the published FIT protocol rather than Garmin's SDK, and is covered by round-trip and adversarial tests. Device-side acceptance varies by model and firmware.

Please email us the file, the device model and the exact error. Two things some devices want that this writer currently omits are a file_id serial number and event start/stop messages — knowing which device refused it tells us which to add. TCX Course is a reasonable interim workaround on devices that accept it.

Elevation comes from an import's own altitude data or from a routing provider that returned it. There is no elevation service in the app, so a route drawn by hand on a map with no altitude data has no profile — and the app says so rather than inventing numbers.

Neither routing provider the app ships with accepts intermediate waypoints or a corridor hint. "Snap" would therefore replace the line you drew with an unrelated route between its two ends, which is worse than not offering it at all. It needs a provider that can match a polyline to the road network.

Off-route detection uses hysteresis so it doesn't fire on GPS noise. When a routing source is available, the app draws a way back onto your route.

It does not rewrite the route itself — a full reroute that replaces the remainder from your position is not implemented. Your planned route stays the route you planned.

Not by us — there is no cloud service behind the app. Your routes are in the app's container on the device, covered by whatever iPhone backup you use (iCloud Backup or an encrypted local backup), and by any files you export yourself.

If a route matters, export it. That is the honest answer for any local-first app.

iPhone running iOS 18 or later. iPad, Apple Watch and CarPlay are out of scope — we would rather not ship a half-adapted layout than claim support we haven't done the work for.

Delete the app. That removes every route, recording, imported map pack and routing pack, along with the preferences. There is no server-side copy to request the deletion of, because none exists.