Can you add a custom activity type to a hiking app?
Most GPS-tracking apps open with a short list of activity types to choose before recording starts, and that list is built around the handful of things most people do most often. It runs out fast. A snowshoe trip, a slow morning spent geocaching, a walk around the block with the dog, an afternoon foraging along a fire road — none of them are quite hiking, quite running, or quite cycling, and picking the closest match every time starts to feel like filing something under the wrong name simply because there is no right one on offer. Whether an app lets you fix that by adding a type of your own is worth knowing before settling for a life of slightly wrong labels.
The short answer
Often, yes. A number of GPS-tracking apps that ship with a fixed list of activity types also let you add ones of your own, usually built from just a name and an icon or emoji, sitting alongside the built-in options afterward and behaving the same way once created. It is not a universal feature — some apps keep their list closed — but it is common enough to be worth checking for before assuming a niche activity has nowhere to go but the nearest wrong category.
Why the built-in list runs out
A preset list has to stop somewhere, and wherever it stops, something real gets left outside it. Most lists are built around a handful of common cases — walking, running, cycling, maybe a couple of others — because that covers the bulk of what most people record most of the time. It was never going to cover the rest of it too.
- A day spent geocaching, which is mostly standing still and doubling back rather than moving in a steady line the way a hike does.
- Snowshoeing, which shares a hiking trail's shape but not its pace, and gets miscategorised either way if the only choices are hiking or skiing.
- A dog walk around the neighbourhood, short and looping, that feels like the wrong kind of entry to sit next to a real hike in a history list.
- An afternoon spent foraging, birdwatching, or beachcombing, where the point of the outing was stopping often, not covering ground.
None of these are exotic. They are just outside whatever handful of categories a list happened to settle on, which is the ordinary fate of any fixed list applied to how people actually spend their time outside.
What adding one actually creates
A custom activity type is, underneath, the same kind of thing a built-in one is: a name and a way to tell it apart at a glance, usually a colour on the map and sometimes an icon, attached to whatever gets recorded under it afterward. Creating one is not building a new mode with its own settings — it is adding an entry to a list, the same list the built-in options already live on, so that a recording made under it can be found, grouped, and coloured the same way any other recording can.
What it does not add
A custom name does not come with its own tuned tracking behaviour. The GPS receiver logs position, elevation and time at the same rate and the same precision no matter what the recording is labelled, built-in or custom — the chip working out where you are has no idea what word a person typed into a name field, and would not change how it works even if it did. Naming an activity "geocaching" does not make the app expect you to stand still more, and naming one "snowshoeing" does not make it expect a slower pace. It is a label, applied after the fact of recording rather than a setting that changes how the recording itself is done.
Where it actually helps
The payoff shows up later, in how a history reads back rather than in how any single outing gets recorded. A dog walk filed under its own type does not quietly inflate a hiking total just because "hiking" was the closest button available at the time, and a season of geocaching outings stays visible as its own thing in a history list instead of dissolving into a catch-all "other" category with nothing in common holding it together. A colour on the map that is specific to what actually happened that day is a small thing on its own, but it adds up across a year of entries into a history that is honestly sorted rather than approximately sorted.
Where TrailCam fits in
TrailCam offers 11 activity types out of the box — hiking, running, cycling, motorbike, skiing, swimming, rowing, driving, transit, train and flight — each with its own colour on the map, plus the option to add your own with a name and an emoji, and to hide any of the built-in ones you never use. Recording itself works the same way underneath regardless of which type, built-in or custom, gets picked before setting out. TrailCam is free to download.
Questions
- Does a custom activity type get recorded any differently from a built-in one?
- No. The GPS recording runs the same way underneath no matter which activity type is attached to it, custom or built-in — a name and, usually, a colour are what a custom type actually adds, not a different way of logging the route.
- Do you have to add a custom activity type before you start recording, or can it wait?
- In apps that support custom types, adding one is generally done through the same picker used to choose an activity before recording, so it tends to sit alongside the built-in list rather than needing to be planned days in advance — the exact flow depends on the app.
- Does giving an activity its own colour on the map change anything about the recorded route itself?
- No. The colour is a display choice layered on top of a route for telling entries apart at a glance — it has no bearing on the position, elevation or time data that makes up the track underneath.
Recording your own routes
TrailCam is an iPhone app that records your route with GPS, keeps video clips, photos and voice notes pinned to the spot where you took them, and exports the result as GPX 1.1 or CSV. It is free to download.