Does turning off Find My iPhone affect GPS tracking on a hike?

The short answer

Turning off Find My iPhone, or Find My for your Apple ID, does not stop a hiking app from recording GPS. The two features do not share a switch. A route being recorded depends entirely on the location permission granted to that specific app, in Settings, under Privacy & Security, then Location Services — a setting Find My has no control over and does not read from.

What Find My iPhone actually is

Find My is Apple's own system for locating a device, or a person who has chosen to share their location with you, through iCloud. It is what lets a lost iPhone be located on a map, lets a family member see where you are if you have both agreed to share, and lets a device be marked lost or erased remotely. All of that runs through Apple's own account system, separately from any third-party app installed on the phone.

Turning Find My off stops that specific system: the phone would no longer be locatable through iCloud, and any live location sharing that runs through Find My would stop. It says nothing about whether any given app on the phone is allowed to read the GPS chip while it is running.

What actually controls whether a hiking app can track you

That is a separate, per-app setting: Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Location Services, then the app itself, where the choice is "Never", "Ask Next Time or When I Share", "While Using the App", or "Always". This is the permission a hiking app is actually built on, and it is what needs to be set to "Always" for a route to keep recording once the screen locks or another app takes over — a separate question covered in its own guide, since it trips people up on its own often enough to deserve one.

Find My and Location Services both appear under the same Privacy & Security heading, which is most of why they get mixed up, but changing one has no effect on the entries in the other. An app with "Always" granted keeps recording a route whether Find My is on, off, or never set up in the first place.

Why the confusion happens

• Both show up during the same initial setup of a new iPhone, often in back-to-back prompts, which makes them feel like one decision rather than two.
• Both use the word "location" in their name and in the little blue arrow icon iOS shows when something is reading GPS, so a person troubleshooting a tracking problem naturally goes looking under "Find My" first.
• Turning off Find My does remove one specific location-sharing behaviour — so if the change happened to coincide with something else going wrong on a hike, it is easy to blame the wrong setting for a problem it had nothing to do with.

What turning off Find My does actually change

If Find My was being used to share your live position with someone before or during a hike — a common enough habit for anyone walking alone — turning it off stops that sharing. The person who had been able to see your position through Find My would no longer be able to. That is a real, separate effect, distinct from anything about whether the route itself keeps recording on the phone doing the walking.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam records a route using the location permission granted to it directly, not through Find My or any other system feature. Once "Always" access is granted the first time it is asked for, the route keeps recording with the screen off or another app open, independent of whatever Find My is set to. It is free to download.