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OffTracks is two halves of one thing: the Android app records where you rode and follows a track while you ride it, and offtracks.app is where tracks are found, shared and edited. This page explains everything both of them do.

How OffTracks works

Ride, Track and Spot: A Ride is one recording — the line your phone drew while you were moving, with its distance, duration and top speed. A Track is a route you can follow: saved from one of your rides, or drawn on the web. A Spot is a short text note pinned to one point on a track, for a gate, a river crossing or a fuel stop.
Your phone comes first: Recording a ride, saving a track and following one all work with no account and no signal, and everything stays on the phone. Signing in is only needed to publish a track, to keep favourites, to rate a track, or to see tracks you made somewhere else.
Signing in: There is no password. Enter your email and OffTracks sends a six-digit code that is good for ten minutes; five wrong tries and you need a new one. A verified email that has never signed in before creates the account. A session lasts thirty days.
Language: OffTracks is in English, Spanish and Portuguese. It starts in whatever your phone or browser asks for and keeps your choice after that — in the app under Language in the menu, and on the web from the picker in the header. Track, Ride and Spot stay English in every language, because they name things rather than describe them.
Light and dark: The website and Android app can follow the system or stay Light or Dark. Each remembers its own choice, and each map follows with a day or night basemap. The car screen has an independent switch of its own, described under Android Auto.

In the app

The map screen: The map opens in Navigation view. Three icon buttons stay at the top right: Track frames the whole loaded line, the arrow follows you heading-up at riding zoom, and the gauge opens the Dashboard. If no Track is loaded, its icon opens the Track list. The button top left opens the menu.
Ride Dashboard: The gauge icon replaces the phone map with the free BASIC speedometer. Alongside current speed it shows trip distance, elapsed time, moving time, remaining Track distance, Track progress, heading, moving average speed and maximum speed. Ride totals need an active recording; remaining distance and progress need a loaded Track. Unavailable values are dashes, and heading appears only while moving. GPS loss clears live speed and heading; warnings flag missing, stale or inaccurate GPS and being off Track. Choose Auto, Light or Dark under Theme in the menu; this choice applies to both the map and Dashboard independently of the car.
Location permission: Precise location is required, and is used for exactly two things: drawing where you are, and recording the line you ride. Without it nothing can be recorded or followed, so the app asks for it on first launch.
Recording a ride: “Start Recording” begins a ride and it keeps running with the screen off: a notification stays in the shade with Pause, Resume and Finish on it. Distance, moving time and top speed are updated as you go, and unreliable fixes are filtered out rather than stored, so standing still does not inflate your distance. “Stop Recording” ends the ride.
Saving a Spot: “Save spot” pins a note at your current GPS position — a title, and notes if you want them. It waits for a valid fix rather than guessing where you are. Spots travel with the track, so every rider who loads it sees them.
Ride history: Menu → Ride history lists every ride on the phone, over the map. A row expands in place to show when the ride started and ended, its moving and total time, and its top speed. From there you can delete a ride, or turn it into a track.
Turning a ride into a Track: Finish a ride, or pick one out of the history, and “Create track” asks for a name, an optional description, and whether it is public. A ride needs at least two good points. Publishing needs a sign-in — tick Public while signed out and the track is still saved, then published as soon as you sign in.
Load Track: the one track list: Menu → “Load Track”, or the button on the map, opens a list over the live map with four tabs: My tracks, Favourites, Top rated and Most favourited. Only one list sits over the map at a time, so opening this one closes the ride history.
My tracks: Everything on this phone, merged with the tracks you own on offtracks.app so nothing appears twice. Signed out you see only what is on the phone; if the server cannot be reached the list says so and still shows the local tracks.
Top rated and Most favourited: Both search the area the map is showing, and “Search this map” runs the search again for wherever you have moved to. Neither needs an account: a signed-out rider opens on Top rated rather than on a sign-in wall. A busy area returns the first page only, so zoom in for the rest.
What a row tells you: Its colour swatch and name, distance and difficulty, its average rating and how many riders favourited it, and who owns it. Tap the row to expand it for the vehicle it suits, its terrain, whether it is a loop or point to point, its description, and how many route points and Spots it has. Everything opens in place — there is no separate track screen.
Downloading a track: A track has to be on the phone before you can follow it, so a result you have not got yet offers Download instead of Load. Once downloaded it works with no signal and appears under My tracks.
Favourites: The heart on a row keeps a track under Favourites on every device you sign in to. It needs an account, and tapping it while signed out offers you the sign-in rather than failing.
Following a track: Load draws the track and measures progress along its recorded line. This is not turn-by-turn navigation and no directions service is involved. The Track icon frames the complete line; the arrow returns to heading-up riding zoom after you pan. Stray more than about 35 metres from it and the app tells you that you are off Track. “Clear track” stops following.
Rating and reviewing: After you ride a shared track the app offers the rating prompt once: one to five stars, and a written review if you have something worth telling the next rider. A review is public alongside your display name. Dismiss the prompt and that track will not ask again. Ratings and reviews are written in the app only — the website cannot post one.
Android Auto: Android Auto has the same Track, Navigation and Dashboard icons. Track frames the loaded line or opens recent tracks, Navigation follows the rider, and Dashboard puts a large speedometer and ride figures over a restrained live map. Theme and zoom controls remain beside the map. Recording, editing and GPX stay on the phone.

On the website

The discovery map: The map is the landing page, and every public track is drawn on it as soon as it loads. Each one takes its own colour from a fixed palette, repeated as a swatch beside its name in the list, so a busy area reads as several separate tracks instead of one tangle. The colour identifies a track and means nothing else.
Finding an area: Type a town, region or country into the place box and the map frames it and searches it. “Search this map” searches exactly what is on screen instead, and “Clear place” goes back to the whole world. Place names come from OpenStreetMap and only choose the rectangle to search.
Ordering results: Best match, Top rated or Most favourited. Changing the order re-ranks the area you last searched, which is not always the area on screen — a place search leaves the map framed somewhere you may since have panned away from.
Picking one track out of the crowd: Clicking a result, or its line on the map, isolates that track and drops its Spots as pins you can click to read. “Show all tracks” brings the others back.
A track’s page: “View details” opens the track itself: its name and owner, distance, difficulty, the vehicle it suits, whether it is a loop, how many route points it has, its rating and favourite count, its description, and the map with its Spots.
Load in the app: A green button under the map on every track page hands that track to the app on your phone: it downloads the line and its Spots and starts following it, with no need to search for it again. Sharing the page address does the same thing — an offtracks.app track link opens in the app when it is installed. If it is not, the button opens the Play Store instead.
Favouriting: The favourite button on a track page fills the same list the app shows under Favourites. It needs a sign-in.
Reviews: A track page shows the three newest reviews and opens the rest in a window. They are written in the app after riding, so there is no way to leave one here.
Comments: Comments are the one thing riders write on the web rather than in the app, because a comment is a conversation and not a verdict on a ride. They are one level deep — you can reply to a comment, but not to a reply — with the newest conversations first and the oldest replies first inside them. Deleting your own comment removes its text; if replies hang off it a [deleted] placeholder stays behind so the thread still makes sense.
Reporting a review or a comment: Every review and every comment carries a Report control. Use it for anything abusive, dangerous or off-topic and we will take a look.
My Tracks: Signed in, My Tracks lists everything you own with its visibility and distance, and offers Publish, Unpublish, Edit, and New track.
Publishing and unpublishing: Everything is private until you publish it, and only the owner can. Publishing makes a track findable by any rider — on this map, and in both of the app’s searches. Unpublish takes it private again at any time, and the ratings and comments it collected stay with it.

The track editor

Where it is: “New track” on My Tracks draws one from nothing; “Edit” on a track you own changes an existing one. This is the only place on the web that writes a route.
Map and satellite imagery: The editor opens on the ordinary map. Use the small map and Satellite icons at its top-left to trace paths that are not drawn on the map. The choice only changes what you see while editing; it does not change the track or its saved route.
Drawing and editing the line: There are no modes to switch between. Double-click the map to add a point: on the line it is inserted between its neighbours, off the line it is appended to the end. Left-click selects a point, left-drag moves it, and left-drag on empty map sweeps a rectangle over everything inside it. Delete removes whatever is selected. The map pans with a right-drag, which is what leaves the ordinary left button free for editing. On a touch screen one finger does the editing and two fingers move and zoom the map, with a double-tap in place of the double-click.
Point handles: Every point has a handle at every zoom, and they shrink as you zoom out so a long track still reads as a line. On a track dense enough to bury itself, “Only selected points” hides every handle except the ones you are working on.
Undo, trim and clear: Undo and Redo step through your edits. “Trim before” and “Trim after” cut everything on one side of the selected point, which is the quick way to drop the ride out to the trail and back. “Clear selection” lets the points be.
Simplify: A recorded line carries far more points than its shape needs. Simplify removes the ones sitting on a straight run, and shows you the before and after — point count and distance — at each tolerance before you apply it. Recorded tracks are already simplified as they are uploaded, within a limit small enough that off-route warnings stay honest. A track drawn by hand is stored exactly as you placed it, because every vertex was deliberate.
Spots: “Add Spot” arms a single placement: your next click on the map drops the Spot there, and you give it a title and notes. An existing Spot can be edited or removed. Saving a change to the route reissues the Spot links, so a link to one individual Spot does not survive an edit.
Details: Name, description, difficulty, the vehicle it suits, terrain tags, whether it is a closed loop, and whether it is public or private. The name is the only one that is required.
What happens when you save: Saving is up to three steps, in order: the route, then the details, then publishing or unpublishing — that order, so a track is never made public before the line you just drew is stored. They can fail separately, and the editor tells you which half landed rather than leaving you to guess.
If the track changed somewhere else: A track edited in two places at once is refused rather than quietly overwritten: reload to get the current version. Changing the route of a track that already has ratings and comments keeps all of them, and the editor says so before you go ahead.
Unsaved changes: Leaving the editor with unsaved work asks first — whether you close the tab, reload it, or click a link on the page.
Deleting a track: At the foot of the edit page, behind a confirmation. The route, its Spots, its ratings and its comments all go with it, and it cannot be undone. This is the only place a track can be deleted.

Privacy

Private by default: Nothing you record is visible to anyone until you publish it. A private track answers “not found” to every other rider rather than “forbidden”, so not even its existence is disclosed.
What publishing shows: A published track shows its route, its Spots, its details and your display name. Publishing one track never discloses another: each published route is its own stored copy, so a ride that shares the same recording stays private.
What is never written down: Sign-in codes, session tokens, complete email addresses, raw IP addresses and precise coordinates are all kept out of the server logs. Only hashes of your session token and of the sign-in code are stored.
Signing out: Signing out of the app ends that phone’s session. Your rides and your downloaded tracks stay on the device.

Before you ride

A track is a record, not a recommendation: Every track is a line some rider actually rode, at some point in the past. It may now be closed, washed out, fenced off or private land, and none of it has been checked by us. Read the description and the Spots, judge it against your bike and your own skill, and turn back when it stops making sense.
Going out of signal: Download the tracks you mean to ride before you leave. Recording and following both work offline, but downloading a track and searching for one do not. Continuous GPS is hard on a battery, so take a way to charge.

When something goes wrong

“Waiting for GPS fix” or “GPS accuracy poor”: The phone has not settled on a position yet. Get clear of buildings and trees and give it a minute — the accuracy figure on the map tells you when it is good enough. A Spot refuses to save without a valid fix rather than landing in the wrong place.
The sign-in code did not arrive: Check the spam folder, and check the address you typed. “Resend code” is available once the countdown ends, and “Use a different email” starts over. A code expires ten minutes after it is sent.
“Too many attempts”: Requesting codes and entering them are both rate limited, and the limit survives restarting the app. Wait a few minutes and try again.
“Publish failed”: A track needs at least two points, and cannot be enormous. Otherwise it is usually the connection: the track stays on the phone, and the app retries the publish the next time you sign in.
“OffTracks is unreachable”: The server could not be reached. Nothing local is affected — recording, following a downloaded track and saving Spots all keep working.

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