Built in the open
Steady updates, no roadmap theatre. 11 changes shipped and listed here — every one of them live, nothing on this page is a promise.
Press play on any trail and the camera now follows a walker along the actual route from behind and above, turning gently through the switchbacks instead of snapping around them. It reads like footage rather than a map animation.
The heart on every trail used to be a padlock unless you subscribed. That was wrong — a favourites list is table stakes, not a premium feature. Save as many as you like on a free account.
Share your live position while you walk and get alerts out automatically if you do not check in. Only the person being tracked needs Pro — everyone watching you does it free.
New pages for Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the ACT — each a ranked list beside a top-down 3D map, where hovering a trail lights it up on the map.
A fallback in the region matcher quietly dumped any trail it could not place onto the South East Queensland page. Trails are now placed by their real coordinates, so regional pages show trails that are actually there.
Park, peak, river, suburb and state names are all on by default and individually switchable. National parks also stopped printing their name a dozen times across one screen.
The full-screen map was swallowing the scroll wheel, so everything below the first screen was unreachable on a desktop. A plain scroll moves the page now; hold Cmd or Ctrl to zoom the map.
Terrain exaggeration came down from 2.2x to 1.1x, so ranges read like real country rather than cardboard spikes, and missing elevation tiles no longer tear black holes in the landscape while you pan.
The /hikes, /hikes/near, /activity and /trail hub pages now exist, so the 75-page regional hierarchy is browsable instead of being a set of orphans you could only reach from search.
Adelaide, Toowoomba, the Sunshine Coast, Canberra, Perth and Hobart joined the near-city pages — trails sorted by real distance from the city, closest first.
Three practical guides covering what the Australian track grading actually means in the field, picking walks that work with children, and getting routes onto a Garmin.
Aus Trails is built by one person, in the open. The free side keeps getting better because that is the point of it — Pro only ever covers work that costs real money to run or that nobody else has built. See what that means.