Where you’ve been
The second button down the right-hand column lays every ride you’ve got onto the map at once, in pink. It’s a quick way to see which roads you keep coming back to — and, more usefully, which ones near you you’ve never turned down.
With the layer on, the button outlines in pink. Every ride you’ve recorded or imported is drawn over the map at once.
Where two rides used the same road the lines sit on top of each other and the pink goes solid — that’s how the roads you use most stand out from the ones you’ve done once.
Turning it on
Tap the layers button — second from the top of the right-hand column, under the record button. It gathers up every ride file on the phone and draws them, which takes a moment on a big collection; the button shows a small spinner while it works. When it’s done the button outline turns pink and stays that way until you tap it again.
It’s a premium feature. Without an active subscription, tapping it brings up the upgrade prompt rather than the layer.
What’s actually drawn
Every ride in your rides folder — recorded rides and imported GPX files alike — is drawn as a pink line about three pixels wide at half opacity. That’s the whole trick. There’s no clever weighting or colour scale: roads look busier because the half-transparent lines stack up on each other, so a road you’ve ridden five times is a stronger pink than one you’ve ridden once.
A few consequences worth knowing:
- It includes files you imported, not only rides you did yourself. A GPX someone sent you counts the same as a ride you rode, which is worth remembering before you conclude you’ve covered more ground than you have.
- Deleting a ride removes it from the heatmap. The layer is built from the files, so clearing something out of My Rides takes it off here too.
- It’s built fresh each time you turn it on. A ride you recorded five minutes ago appears next time you switch the layer on — turn it off and on again if you’ve only now saved something.
- Very short files are skipped. A file with fewer than two usable points has no line to draw, so a recording that caught almost nothing doesn’t show up at all.
Living with the map underneath
The heatmap sits over the normal map, so the roads, town names and any other layers you have on are still there behind it. It survives the map switching between its day and night styles — turn it on in the afternoon and it’s still there after sunset.
It doesn’t interfere with anything else. You can navigate with it on, record with it on, and search with it on. The only real cost is visual: over a few hundred rides in one city it becomes a lot of pink, and you may want it off while you’re actually following a route.
Tapping the button again removes the layer and its data from the map, so there’s no lingering cost to having had it on.
If nothing appears
The commonest reason by far is that you’re not looking at the right place. The layer draws where your rides are, not where the map is pointing — zoom out or pan to the country you actually ride in and the lines will be there.
After that, work down this list:
- Have you got any rides? Open My Rides. An empty list means an empty heatmap.
- Did the button actually turn pink? If the outline stayed grey, the layer didn’t go on.
- Try it off and on again. The layer is rebuilt from scratch each time, so a second attempt often fixes it.
When the app can’t build or draw the heatmap it stops quietly — the spinner ends, the button goes back to grey and there’s no message explaining why. So a button that refuses to stay pink means something went wrong, not that you have no rides. Check My Rides to tell the two apart.
The interesting part of a heatmap isn’t where you’ve been — it’s the road two valleys over that has no pink on it at all. Zoom out to your usual range, find a blank one, and go and put a line on it.