GPX Explore
Open a GPX file. See the whole ride.
Every watch, bike computer and fitness service can hand you a GPX file. Most apps show you a line on a map. GPX Explore shows you the ride: where it climbed and how hard, what your heart rate and power were doing on that climb, how long you were actually moving, and how each kilometre went. It reads the entire file, from a 2001 handheld log to a Garmin export with five sensors, and it never sends any of it anywhere.
Mac, iPad, iPhone
Free. No account. One download.
Try it, right here
This is a real file, a run around Washington’s McMillan Reservoir from a Garmin watch, drawn the way the app draws it. Move across the chart and the marker follows on the map; switch the series to heart rate or speed. In the app you do this with a finger on iPhone and a trackpad or mouse on the Mac, and the marker moves on the live map.
Move across the chart. In the app the same scrub works with a finger, a mouse or a trackpad.
Colour tells you the climb
The track is painted by grade: blue where it is flat, green as it rises, orange and red on the steep pitches. You can read a route before you ride it, and you can see where the hard part of the day was without touching the chart. A second mode colours by elevation instead, which is the better view of a mountain traverse, and both work on standard, satellite and hybrid maps.
Every number your watch recorded
GPX files from Garmin, Strava, Wahoo, Coros, Suunto and Apple Watch carry more than positions: heart rate, cadence, power, speed and temperature ride along on every point. GPX Explore charts any of them under the map, with a picker to switch series, and the route card sums up the workout the way a training log would: distance, moving time with the stops taken out, average pace for runs and hikes or average speed for rides, max speed, elevation gain and loss with GPS noise filtered, the sensor averages, and splits per kilometre or mile.
Those numbers were tuned on real files rather than tidy ones: a 2001 receiver that logged a point a minute, a watch that logs one a second, a planned route whose points carry edit stamps instead of a clock, a tour stitched into one segment across two years. Each of those breaks a naive formula, and the ones that shipped are the ones that survived all of them.
Files from anywhere
GPX Explore reads the complete GPX 1.1 schema and the GPX 1.0 files older tools still write: tracks, routes and waypoints with their names, symbols and comments, the file’s own metadata, and the extensions every exporter adds. Files that confuse other viewers open here: timestamps with fractional seconds, tracks with no elevation or no times, a route with no track at all, a file that is nothing but 9,000 waypoints. It has been fed exports from Garmin Connect, Strava, Komoot, RideWithGPS, GPSies, MapSource, GPS Visualizer, ExpertGPS, Geo Tracker and our own WorkoutGPX, which turns any Apple Health workout into a GPX file for it.
Made for the Mac
Eight in ten people who use GPX Explore use it on a Mac, and it behaves like a Mac app should. Double-click a .gpx file and it opens. Press space in Finder and Quick Look draws the track, coloured by grade, before you open anything. The tracks and waypoints drawer shows every track, segment and waypoint in the file so you can hide the ones you are not looking at. Keyboard shortcuts cover the things you do all day: ⌘0 fits the track, ⌘E toggles the chart, ⌘I the route card, ⌘1 to ⌘3 switch map styles, ⌘, opens settings.
When you want the ride out of the app, share the GPX file from the toolbar, or export the map with the chart under it as a single picture, coloured as on screen, with the name and the numbers along the bottom.
On iPhone and iPad
The same app, the same file. Open a GPX from Mail, Messages, Files or any app that shares one, and it lands on the map with the strip of numbers at the top; tap the strip for the full card and the splits. The chart scrubs with a finger. On iPad the drawer sits beside the map like it does on the Mac.
No file handy? Try these
Real tracks, free to use. Download one, then open it with GPX Explore.
- Blue Hills Reservation: three hikes, fourteen segments and forty-six named waypoints from a 2001 handheld, near Boston.
- McMillan Reservoir run: a 3 km run in Washington, DC from a Garmin watch, with heart rate.
- Brittany coast: a 25 km ride from Lannion to Plestin in two tracks.
- Mystic River trails: tracks, planned routes and waypoints in one file.
Yours stays yours
GPX Explore is a viewer. It does not edit your files, it has no account, no sync and no server, and it makes no network request beyond the map tiles Apple Maps draws. The file you open is read on your device and nowhere else.
Questions people ask
How do I open a GPX file on a Mac? Install GPX Explore from the Mac App Store and double-click the file. If another app has claimed .gpx files, right-click the file, choose Get Info, pick GPX Explore under Open With and click Change All.
Does it show heart rate, power and cadence? Yes, when the file carries them. Garmin, Strava, Wahoo, Coros and Suunto exports and WorkoutGPX files from Apple Health all do. The chart’s picker lists whatever the file has.
Which files does it open? Any GPX 1.1 or 1.0 file: tracks, routes and waypoints, with or without elevation and timestamps, in any combination.
Can it edit or convert? No. GPX Explore reads and shows. For turning Apple Health workouts into GPX, use WorkoutGPX.
Is it free? Yes, on every platform, with no in-app purchases.
What changed lately? The newest work is written up in the release post.