Velorki
You plan a bike route the evening before. The app wants an account. Offline maps are a subscription. The route is worked out on someone’s server, so when you take a wrong turn up a valley with one bar of signal, nothing recalculates. And every ride you record from then on lives in a database you don’t own.
Velorki does the whole thing on the phone. A bike route planner, turn-by-turn navigation and a ride recorder for iPhone, iPad, Android and Apple Watch, free, with no account and no signal needed. It is on the App Store and Google Play, and the source is on GitHub under AGPL-3.0.
Cycling routes calculated on the phone
BRouter is the routing engine most serious bike apps quietly rely on, and it is written in Java. I ported it to Dart so it runs inside the app instead of on a server, over OpenStreetMap data. Five profiles: touring, road, gravel, MTB and direct. It also builds loops from a start point and a length, and alternatives you can compare side by side. Download a region once and you can plan new routes in it forever, offline. No server to call, so nothing to pay for and nothing to shut down.
Offline maps, offline search, turn-by-turn
The same download brings the map, the routing data and a place index, so searching for a bakery works with the phone in flight mode. Navigation speaks the turns, reroutes when you leave the line, and builds instructions from the map for GPX files that arrived without any. The cycle map draws bike paths and surfaces, and the stops you actually want mid-ride: drinking water, cafés, toilets, repair stands.
Ride recording
Distance, splits, climbs, surface breakdown, heart rate zones and calories. Heart rate, cadence and power over Bluetooth, an Apple Watch app, and Apple Health or Health Connect if you want the ride there too. Rides export as GPX, FIT or TCX, and sync to Strava and Ride with GPS if you use them.
Weather you can ride by
Rain radar, clouds and wind on the map with a time slider, and the forecast along the route at the time you will actually reach each point. The line can be coloured by headwind or by rain, with a slider for when you leave, so you can see that setting off two hours later means riding home dry. Komoot and Bikemap keep that behind their paid tiers. In Velorki it is free.
Your rides stay yours
There is no Velorki account, because there is no Velorki database. Sync goes through your own iCloud or Google Drive, between iPhone, iPad, Android and the browser. I cannot see your routes, and that is the point.
Open source
The app, the Dart router, the relay and the website are AGPL-3.0 on GitHub. The relay only holds OAuth secrets and the hosted LLM, and you can run your own and skip the subscription entirely. Along the way the text-to-speech turned into its own package, speak, because no existing one handled a spoken prompt over music properly.
Velorki Plus
What the phone can do from open data is free, for everyone. Plus is a subscription for the few things that genuinely need a server: finer local weather along the route, real rain radar across Europe, the assistant that turns a sentence into a route, and share links. The Plus page lists what it costs in your country.
Velorki is at velorki.com, on the App Store, Google Play and GitHub.
