Trail Sense

Use your Android phone's sensors to assist with wilderness treks or survival situations. Designed for entirely offline use.

As featured in the #WeArePlay campaign!

F-Droid	Google Play

Table of Contents

• 2022
• Goals
• Features
• Privacy
• Contributing
• FAQ
• Support
• Open Source Credits
• License

2022 Goals

• Release tides, maps, and cloud scanner
• Refine existing tools
• Make TS more focused
• Improve stability, usability, and performance
• Increase test coverage

Goals

• Trail Sense must not use the Internet in any way, as I want the entire app usable when there is no Internet connection
• Features must provide some benefits to people using the app while hiking, in a survival situation, etc.
• Features should make use of the sensors on a phone rather than relying on stored information such as guides
• Features must be based on peer-reviewed science or be verified against real world data
• Use Cases (WIP)

Features

• Compass navigation
• Flashlight and SOS
• Barometer forecasting
• Astronomy

See the need for a new feature? Post it here!

Navigation

The compass can be used to determine the direction to North, and when combined with the GPS it can be used to navigate to predefined locations. The predefined locations, known as beacons, can be created while at a location and at any point you can use the compass to navigate back to where the beacon was placed. You can also use Backtrack to record waypoints and retrace your steps.

Example beacons: home, work, trailhead, campsite

Weather

The barometer can be used to determine if the weather will change soon and if a storm is likely to occur. The barometric pressure history (last 48 hours) is displayed as a graph and an interpretation of the current reading is shown. If the pressure suddenly drops, a storm alert notification is sent. Note, this feature is only available for phones which have a barometer.

Astronomy

View the sun/moon rise and set times and see the current phase of the moon at your exact location.

Privacy

Location information gathered by this application does not leave your device (as a matter of fact, this app doesn't use the Internet at all). The altitude and pressure history for the last 48 hours is stored in local app storage - this is used to determine weather forecasts. The last known location is also stored in app preferences to allow faster load times and support app functionality when the GPS can not be reached. The beacons store their location in a local SQLite database. All of this information is cleared when you clear the app storage or delete it.

Permissions

• Location (fine, background): Used for beacon navigation, True North, barometer altitude correction (in background), and sun/moon rise/set times

Contributing

• Request a new feature
• Submit an issue
• Translate Trail Sense on Weblate
• Test out new features

If you choose to write a new feature yourself, send me a message to verify that it is something that I will accept into Trail Sense before your write it (if not, you can always fork this repo and create your own version of Trail Sense!). I will conduct a code review on incoming pull requests to verify they align nicely with the rest of the code base and the feature works as intended.

Issues marked with the help-wanted label are open for community contribution at any time (just submit a PR to main and I will review it), or leave a comment on the story to say you are working on it / ask for more details. Please leave a comment on any other issue before you work on them because they might not have all the details, I may not want it implemented yet, or I may have to implement it myself - for fun :)

If an issue has a milestone and you would like to work on it, please leave a comment before working on it or creating a pull request. If you do not have the feature completed within 4 days of when I plan to release, I will implement it.

FAQ

The FAQ has moved to the wiki

Support

PayPal	Liberapay

Open Source Credits

• Icons: Austin Andrews and Michael Irigoyen
• Charts: MpAndroidChart
• Thank you to everyone who tried out this app and opened issues, suggested features, provided translations, or tested debug builds for me
• Thanks to @qwerty287 for implementing several features and bugfixes

License

• MIT license