I have an interest in knowing where I’ve been. Since February of 2024 I’ve been riding a bike, almost daily, and I started just riding in the same places, but as I would do longer rides I would always check out the map created by Apple Fitness. (I use an Apple Watch to start my “workouts” and it sends the data to my iPhone.)
Apple Fitness gives you a map like this. It’s fine. The map is dark, the line for your route is bright yellow. It’s simple, and it works. (It’s the “Apple Way”?) You can switch to a satellite view as well, which I find useless.
Matt recommended I try RunGap which I like because it just imports your data from Apple Fitness and provides a few additional features, and a few more mapping options, as well as showing more data.
One thing I eventually wanted was a way to see all of my rides on one big map. I was trying to figure out if I could use the data from RunGap to make such a map…
I use the free version of RunGap. I should mention that along the way I found my data. Now, if you want to export your data from RunGap it’s $14.99 USD per year for a subscription, or $4.99 for three months. All I want to do is a local data dump. RunGap lets you export to like 30+ services, so I get that they want to get paid to support all that. BUT! in the Export options are two things: CSV Export and Backup Data. The CSV Export requires a paid subscription, but the Backup Data option lets you create a copy of the SQLite database the app uses, which is full of all sorts of great data! (Though you have to reverse engineer the relationships!)
So I’ve poked around at the SQLite database, got some interesting stuff from it by writing lots of Python, but ultimately I decided it was not going to work for mapping my rides…
I’ve mentioned Apple Fitness but not Apple Health. On the iPhone is another app called Apple Health, and you can export all of your data from there! The thing is, it is slow, and it is all your data. You don’t want to do an export every day, but once a year or once a month is not too painful.
After exporting my data I got a ZIP file that was 90MB which expands to nearly 2GB! So much data… But there’s a folder named workout-routes which is about 214MB and is filled with GPX files! A GPS File is “GPS Exchange Format” and it contains waypoints, routes, and tracks. I use Apple Fitness for tracking walks and bike rides. That’s how those maps get created.
Okay, this is getting long so I’ll end it here but Part II will continue the adventure of mapping my bike rides!