Komoot’s Apple Watch App Gets Offline Maps & Routing: Hand-on!

January 26, 2026

In arguably one of the biggest bits of news for outdoor-focused Apple Watch owners in years, Komoot just announced true offline mapping and routing for their Apple Watch app. Up until now, their app required some sort of connectivity, notably to the phone, in order to have offline maps/routing.

This is a big deal in the Apple Watch world, which largely still lacks usable and globally functioning offline routing and route creation. While Apple rolled out native offline maps 1.5 years ago, that turned out to be quite limited. It mostly only worked in North America (with a few pockets outside of that), and was heavily dependent on being able to create the route you wanted in Apple Maps. If a trail didn’t show up in Apple Maps, you couldn’t plan a route over that chunk of ground (e.g., no importing in .GPX files/etc…). Here in Europe, where I live, I couldn’t even create a route out of my neighborhood via common trails, as they didn’t show up in Apple Maps. And finally, it’s all in a separate app in Apple’s case (so workout data is separate from map/route data). DC RAINMAKER