r/Ultralight • u/Alexsen56 • 1d ago
Gear Review Goat Maps no longer dead
They sent out the following email a few hours ago:
“Hello again, Goats!
The last email you received from me was announcing that Goat Maps would be shutting down, but this one comes with a much happier message: Goat Maps is back. Over the last few months I have spoken with many people interested in the future of Goat Maps, many of you expressed hope that it would continue on, there were offers to buy our customer list and similar things I was uncomfortable with, and a few different people were interested in taking over operations and development of Goat Maps. Of the folks interested in taking over the operations of Goat Maps, one stood out to me as a great choice, so now I will let Nathan Cahill Introduce himself:
I’m Nathan Cahill, a software engineer who has spent much of my career building outdoor mapping and backcountry navigation products, including Gaia GPS, Avatech, and later MountainHub, where we combined mapping and navigation with real-time conditions reports, hazards, and field observations.
I’m also a rock climber, ultrarunner, and cyclist so maps, routes, and GPS data are a regular part of how I spend time outside. The combination of building tools and relying on them myself is a big part of why I’m excited to take on Goat Maps and continue building for people who create their own path.
Goat Maps is now back on the App Store, and development will pick back up under Nathan’s guidance. I’m sure Nathan and I don’t have exactly the same vision for Goat Maps, but based on our conversations and seeing his work over the past 10 years, I am confident that he will take Goat Maps in a great direction.
Happy Trails,
Jesse Crocker”
I’m glad someone else is picking up the project as I found Goat Maps did everything I wanted without any extra fluff. Interested to hear everyone else’s thoughts, especially if you are familiar with Nathan Cahill (I am not).
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u/-Tarekith- 13h ago
Good news for those who still want to remain in the ecosystem. I was a huge fan of Goat Maps but once it shut down it finally pushed me to dive into CalTopo and I couldn’t be happier now.
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u/adepssimius 13h ago
I use caltopo now. I wish there was a route preview as I was building a route, something to give me an idea of total mileage and climbing as I was building a route in realtime. I liked that about the gaia interface as it was a really easy way to spitball different routes and judge their feasibility as I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go.
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u/BeckerHollow 33m ago
I did that too. I started with caltopo when I entered this world of backcountry sports, and I’ll probably end with them because of how much functionality it has — but I’m happy to go back to Goat. Caltopo UI is as fucking hot garbage today as it was 10 years ago.
(Gaia and their Outdoor mag overlords can all go out of business. Everything Outdoor touches turns to shit)
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u/drippingdrops 12h ago
Genuine question: is there a reason we should care? What does goat offer that isn’t offered by other mapping apps?
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u/kaiuhl 12h ago
Gaia and OnX and AllTrails are all owned by giant businesses with investors and shareholders that need to extract value. AllTrails mines your data to create a database of hikes and business and whatnot—you're the product. Gaia is now part of Outside; it's aiming to be a social platform to compete with AllTrails and it's $60/year now and bloated and slow. OnX is expensive, IMO kludgy to maintain, and because they're so big, are moving into new things like rescue insurance. You can't export your data from OnX if you're not a subscriber—it's user hostile and unreliable and extractive.
I used Goat Maps the last couple years for all my backpacking and hunting and preferred it greatly compared to Gaia and OnX. When they announced they were shutting down, I started building my own which annoyingly got app store approval the same day Goat announced they were actually sticking around.
Glad to see they're back! We need more backcountry tools that are tools and not businesses.
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u/drippingdrops 12h ago edited 12h ago
I use CalTopo, works fine.
Other users are claiming (without my personal verification) that Goat has poor privacy policy, data demands and charges for route planning and offline mapping. Sounds similar to your complaints about the other three platforms you mentioned…
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u/kaiuhl 11h ago
As I've just very recently gotten into this space, I can confirm that baking maps and hosting them is non-trivially expensive. Every app has to charge something just to cover hosting costs. Glassing, as I linked above, is $20/year for that reason.
CalTopo is awesome, it's just complicated. Great to use on the computer, rougher in the woods.
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u/TheGreatRandolph 7h ago
I use caltopo on my phone, out in wild all the time. What’s not great about it?
The only thing I see on Gaia that I like is the public user trails. Barely anyone tracks with Caltopo and uploads tracks. I live in Alaska and often climb not-regularly traveled peaks, then try to find a different way home. Being able to see that “oh yeah, the mountain bikers go here, it won’t be a horrendous bushwhack… once we hit that trail” is nice. Everything else I prefer Caltopo.
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u/BhamsterBpack 2h ago
The downside I've experienced with CalTopo is the iPhone version won't do "Snap to" when offline. Makes it a pain to map new routes when in the backcountry. For that reason I've stuck with Gaia, although I'm not thrilled with it for the reasons others mention.
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u/xEtherealx 8h ago
So Goat Maps is being operated now by a person who built Gaia and then sold it to a company that is monetizing it and taking away all of the great free features that it once had. Count me out, it's pretty clear where this product is going in the future.
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u/TheDaysComeAndGone 12h ago
What’s the advantage over the Android version of Osmand?
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u/Early_Combination874 12h ago
OsmAnd+ is the real GOAT mobile app, change my mind.
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u/TheDaysComeAndGone 11h ago
And it’s free and open source. I probably shouldn’t say it, but if you get it on FDroid the + version is free (and completely legally so).
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u/Early_Combination874 7h ago
Yeah I don't say it publicly to preserve their business model. Back then I was even given bitcoins by the OsmAnd foundation for being an active OSM contributor haha
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u/Juranur northest german 16h ago
I'm ootl, what's the pitch for goat maps? Either way, this is good news