Shade Navigator: Shaded Routes

Plenty of apps route you the fast way. Shade Navigator finds shaded walking routes instead — offline walking navigation that knows where buildings and trees actually cast their shadows at the date and time you set out. Not "this street looks leafy" — a real shadow map, built from the skyline as seen from each point along your path.

WHY WALK IN THE SHADE
• Stay cooler in hot weather without adding much distance
• Arrive less sweaty for a commute, a meeting or the school run
• Keep prams, dogs and older walkers out of direct midday sun
• Cut UV and sun exposure on the routes you already walk every day
• Make summer walking pleasant again instead of something to endure

THE TIME SLIDER
Drag it and the whole route recolours instantly, warm where the sun reaches you and cool where it does not. No spinner, no waiting, no signal required — the shadow map is already on your phone. Plan a 7am walk at midnight, or check what your usual route looks like at 3pm in July before you commit to it.

SHADE THAT UPDATES AS YOU WALK
On a forty minute walk the sun moves ten degrees, so the route you started with is not the route you are on. Walk mode re-evaluates what is ahead of you every few minutes and adjusts, which most shade maps and walking route planners do not do.

SHORTEST TO SHADIEST, YOUR CHOICE
Some days you want the quick way. One slider moves you from the shortest route to the shadiest one, and the app tells you what the detour costs and what it buys: "+450 m, three times more shade". You decide the trade, walk by walk.

OFFLINE WALKING NAVIGATION
Your phone builds your area once — a few minutes over wifi — and every route after that is calculated on the device. A dead cell in a park, a foreign SIM, airplane mode, roaming in another country: none of it changes anything. Shaded walking routes are worked out on your handset, so your location is never sent anywhere, because there is no server to send it to.

WALK MODE
Follow your route with a GPS position marker, the map turned to the way you are facing, and simple turn-by-turn walking directions. If you wander off, it finds you a new way from where you actually are. All of it offline, in a notification you can see and stop at any time.

WE TELL YOU HOW GOOD THE DATA IS
Every route shows which height data it used, and tapping that tells you where the data came from and what its error margin is. When we are working from estimated building heights with no tree canopy data, we say so rather than letting a guess look like a survey. You are deciding whether to trust a shade estimate for a July afternoon; you should know what is behind it.

WHO WALKS WITH IT
• Commuters covering the last mile from a station or car park
• Parents on the school run with a pram or a slow five-year-old
• Dog walkers avoiding hot pavement in the middle of the day
• Runners planning shaded summer training routes
• Travellers exploring a hot city on foot for a day
• Anyone whose medication or health makes sun exposure a problem
• Anyone getting through a heatwave on foot

ALSO IN THE APP
• Save home, work and anywhere else for one-tap shaded walking routes
• Share any walking route as a GPX file
• Set your walking speed — it changes which route you get, not just the estimate
• Metric or imperial units
• Full TalkBack support, large text support, high-contrast outdoor design
• No accounts, no ads, no analytics, no trackers
• Works fully offline after the first area download

Built on OpenStreetMap. Open data, credited in the app.