5 Best Offline Apps for Nepal Trekking in 2026

Why Offline Apps Are Essential on Himalayan Trails

Trekking in Nepal takes you through some of the most dramatic mountain terrain on earth, and far beyond the reach of reliable mobile networks. Once you walk out of Lukla, Besisahar, or Syabrubesi, cell service thins out fast, leaving long stretches where map streaming, cloud sync, and live weather simply do not work. An app that needs a connection to draw its own map is not a mountain app.

High altitude navigation also breaks assumptions that city mapping apps are built on. Lithium batteries lose usable capacity below freezing, so a phone that lasts two days in Kathmandu may not last one above 4,500m. Deep river valleys and shifting glacial moraine hide footpaths that look obvious on a screen. And the thing most likely to end your trek is not a wrong turn but Acute Mountain Sickness, which no map layer will warn you about.

The fix is a setup you build in Kathmandu or Pokhara, while you still have fast Wi-Fi and mains power: offline map tiles saved to the device, your route imported as a GPX track, your daily sleeping altitude plan written down, and your checklists and emergency contacts stored where you can reach them with the phone in airplane mode. Here is how five apps handle that job in 2026, and where each one runs out.

How We Chose These Apps, and Where Our Bias Sits

Start with the disclosure, because it changes how you should read the ranking: we make TrekGuard. Putting our own app at the top of our own list is a conflict of interest, and no amount of writing around it makes that untrue. What we can do is be specific about what TrekGuard actually does, name the things it does not do, and be accurate about the competition rather than setting up strawmen. Every limitation listed below is real, including ours.

The test that mattered most was simple: put the phone in airplane mode for a full trekking day and see what still works. An app that quietly degrades once the signal drops fails the only condition that counts on a Himalayan trail. After that we looked at GPX import, contour and terrain detail, battery behaviour with the screen mostly off, cost, and whether the app has anything to say about altitude rather than just position.

One structural note before the list. These are not five competing products so much as two categories: map viewers, and safety tools that happen to include a map. Gaia GPS, Mapy.com, Organic Maps, and Maps.me are the former. Most experienced trekkers end up running one from each category rather than looking for a single app that does everything, and that is the recommendation this article lands on. If you'd rather skip the ranking and go straight to setup, our guide to choosing a Nepal trekking app covers the GPX, offline map, and checklist prep that applies no matter which apps you pick.

The Five Apps at a Glance

The table below is the short version. Everything after it explains where each app earns its place and where it stops being useful, because a row in a table cannot tell you that an app's offline maps sit behind a subscription you only discover at the trailhead.

1. TrekGuard: Best for Altitude Safety and Acclimatization Tracking

TrekGuard is free on Google Play and, as of 2026, Android only. If you carry an iPhone, skip to Gaia GPS or Mapy.com and pair one of them with a paper acclimatization plan. That platform gap is the single biggest limitation of the app, and it is worth stating before the features rather than after.

The map side works the way an offline app should. You download regional map packs and import your route as a GPX file over Wi-Fi in the city, and from then on the app draws your position, distance covered, remaining ascent, elevation profile, and nearby waypoints from data already on the device. Backtrack records the line you actually walked, so if visibility closes in on a moraine section you can retrace your own track rather than guess at the trail.

Where TrekGuard differs from a map app is altitude. It fuses GPS and barometric pressure sensor data to produce a smoothed altitude and ascent rate, then compares your progress against published acclimatization rules: a maximum 500m gain in sleeping altitude per day above 3,000m, a rest day every third day above 3,500m, and credit for climbing high and sleeping low when your day ends at least 300m below its high point. When your itinerary breaks those rules, the app says so while you can still change the plan.

It also carries an offline Lake Louise AMS self-check. If you get a headache at Dingboche, you score your own symptoms in the app and get a severity reading and a descend-or-hold recommendation without needing a signal. Alongside that sit the ordinary trip-planning pieces: gear checklists, hydration and first-aid references, waypoints, compass, trek history, and stored emergency contact details.

One design decision is worth flagging because it cuts against the marketing instinct. TrekGuard will not hide a bad reading to look confident. When altitude confidence drops, or a weather forecast is hours stale, the app downgrades what it claims rather than showing a clean number it cannot support, and it suppresses altitude-derived warnings that the sensor data does not justify. A safety app that cries wolf on noisy GPS trains you to ignore it. You can download TrekGuard, read the altitude safety guidelines, and work through the Nepal packing checklists before you leave.

2. Gaia GPS: Best for Topographic Layer Customization

Gaia GPS is the pick for technical navigators and anyone going off the teahouse network. It runs on both iOS and Android, and its strength is layer depth: high-resolution satellite imagery, shaded relief, slope-angle shading, and topographic sets you can stack and compare against each other.

For route planning that matters. You can study a ridge line, judge whether a descent is walkable or a scramble, mark water sources and high camps as waypoints, and record a track as you go. If your trip involves any route-finding rather than following a well-trodden trail between lodges, this is the most capable map on the list.

The costs are real. Offline tile downloads, the feature you actually need in Nepal, sit behind a paid subscription, so budget for it before you fly. Heavy raster layers draw more battery than a simple vector map. And Gaia is a navigation tool by design, with nothing to say about acclimatization pacing, AMS symptoms, or Nepal-specific permit and checklist admin.

3. Mapy.com: Best Free Topographic Contour Maps

Mapy.com, still widely known by its old name Mapy.cz, is a Czech navigation app that has quietly become a favourite among European and Himalayan hikers. It is free, runs on iOS and Android, and lets you download detailed outdoor maps by country or region without a subscription.

The outdoor layer is the reason to install it: clean contour lines, shaded relief, and marked hiking trails, with enough visual contrast between forested valley, scree, and snow-covered pass to make a profile legible at a glance. For picturing what Thorong La or Cho La actually asks of you before you are standing under it, it is excellent, and it costs nothing.

What it is not is a safety tool. There is no altitude gain monitoring, no AMS logging, no packing or permit workflow. Trail coverage in Nepal comes from OpenStreetMap contributions and is strong on popular routes, thinner off them. Treat a drawn trail as a strong hint rather than a guarantee that a path exists on the ground.

4. Organic Maps: Best Lightweight Open-Source Backup

Organic Maps is an open-source, privacy-focused fork of the original Maps.me codebase. It is free, carries no ads or tracking, runs on iOS and Android, and its regional downloads are small enough that you can keep several Nepal regions on a phone without thinking about storage.

It draws on OpenStreetMap data, which in Nepal means a genuinely useful density of teahouses, water taps, suspension bridges, monasteries, and health posts along the popular corridors. Search works offline, which is the part that matters when you are trying to find the name of the lodge someone recommended three villages ago.

Detail is the trade-off. Contour rendering is basic next to Mapy.com, elevation profiling is limited, and there is no altitude or health function at all. It earns its place as the low-cost, low-storage backup that will still open when your primary app misbehaves, not as the app you navigate a pass with.

5. Maps.me: Best for Village and Teahouse Points of Interest

Maps.me is the app you will see most often on other trekkers' phones in Nepal, largely on momentum: it was the default offline map for a decade of backpackers, and its point-of-interest database along routes like Poon Hill, Annapurna Base Camp, and the main Everest trail is dense and well maintained.

It is free, available on both platforms, and quick to use for the everyday questions of a teahouse trek. Where is the next water point, which lodges are marked before the climb, how far to the bridge. For that narrow job it is fast and reliable.

Recent versions carry more ads and upsell than the app long-time users remember, which is the main reason Organic Maps has drawn people away. Like the other map viewers it has no contour depth worth relying on and no altitude safety features. If you want the same POI database without the ads, install Organic Maps instead.

Which App to Use on Which Route

For a standard teahouse trek to Everest Base Camp, the Annapurna Circuit, or Langtang, the sensible Android setup is TrekGuard as the primary tool for GPX, altitude tracking, and acclimatization pacing, with Mapy.com installed as a free second map for contour detail and as insurance against one app failing. On iOS, swap TrekGuard for Mapy.com as primary and keep Organic Maps as the backup, and do your acclimatization planning on paper before you leave.

For Manaslu Circuit, the Three Passes, or anything crossing a 5,000m col in uncertain conditions, the altitude tools matter more than the map does. These are routes where the sleeping-altitude arithmetic decides whether the trip works, and where a rest day at the right village is worth more than any layer you can render.

For genuine off-trail or expedition-style travel, Gaia GPS becomes the primary map and the subscription pays for itself, but it does not remove the need for a separate altitude plan. Redundancy across two apps is not paranoia here. It is the standard setup, because a single app that crashes, corrupts a tile cache, or drains the battery you were relying on is a single point of failure.

Whatever combination you land on, a GPX track is a planning layer, not permission. It shows where a trail was recorded, not whether the pass is crossable today, whether the snow line has dropped, or whether your body is ready for the altitude the line runs through. Our guide to offline GPX navigation in Nepal covers how to import, verify, and sanity-check a track, and the Himalayan trail database has day-by-day elevation profiles to check your itinerary against.

What These Apps Cannot Do

No app on this list is an emergency service, and being clear about that is more useful than another feature list. TrekGuard's emergency tool assembles a message with your location and trek details and hands it to your phone's SMS composer. You press send yourself, and it needs signal to go anywhere. That is a genuine safeguard in a village with a bar of reception and no safeguard at all on a high pass. If your route spends days out of coverage, a satellite messenger is not an optional upgrade, and no phone app substitutes for one.

Weather is the other honest exception to offline-first. Forecasts need a live connection to refresh, so what you carry into a dead zone is a cached snapshot that ages into history. TrekGuard shows you how old that snapshot is rather than presenting it as current, which is the correct behaviour and also a reminder to trust what the sky is doing over what a three-day-old panel says. Mountain forecast models are probabilistic everywhere and weakest exactly where terrain is most complex.

Altitude readings degrade too. Barometric pressure moves with weather as well as elevation, GPS altitude is noisy in steep valleys, and a phone that has been cold in a pocket takes time to settle. This is why TrekGuard downgrades its own confidence instead of showing a number it cannot stand behind, and it is why an app should never be the only input to a descend-or-continue decision.

And none of these replace a licensed local guide, travel insurance that explicitly covers helicopter evacuation above your maximum trekking altitude, or the judgement to turn back. The most useful thing software does on a Himalayan trek is make a conservative plan easy to follow. It cannot make an aggressive one safe. Our guide to preventing altitude sickness covers the decisions that actually determine how your trek goes.

Digital Prep Before You Leave Kathmandu or Pokhara

Do the downloads in the city. Offline map tiles, regional packs, and GPX files should all be on the device while you have fast Wi-Fi and mains power. Pulling a large tile set over a solar-powered teahouse connection at 4,000m with a cold phone is slow, expensive, and often fails halfway. Download a wider area than your planned route while you are at it, because rerouting around a blocked section is more common than trekkers expect and a tile pack that stops at the edge of your intended line is no help when the line changes.

Manage the battery deliberately. Keep the phone in airplane mode for the whole trek so it is not burning power hunting for towers that are not there, and turn the radio on only when you want a forecast or a message. Carry the phone in an inside jacket pocket against your body during the day, and sleep with the phone and power bank inside your sleeping bag rather than beside it. A 20,000mAh bank covers roughly five to seven days of moderate use with GPS running; on Manaslu or the Three Passes, carry more.

Set up the safety pieces before they are needed, not during. Enter your emergency contacts, configure your daily altitude gain limits for your actual itinerary, and give a trusted person at home your route, your expected return date, and a specific trigger for raising the alarm if you do not check in. Carry physical copies of your permits and passport alongside the digital ones, because a checkpoint does not care that your phone has no signal.

Then check your dates against the season. Conditions do more to determine how a Nepal trek goes than any app in this comparison, and our Nepal trekking seasons guide and Himalayan packing guide are the two things worth reading before you book. When the setup is done, download TrekGuard and work through the pre-trek checklist while you still have signal to fix what is missing.

Frequently Asked Questions