the guide the app carries, in full
If it's outside, we're on it. Cherry Outside draws what the agencies publish — NOAA, the Weather Service, USNO, USGS, NRCS, the Forest Service, the Park Service — for the place you choose, station by station, and never invents a number; and it keeps your own day out, every track, photograph and note, on your phone. This is how to find your way around it.
Five tabs along the foot of the screen: BASECAMP, WEATHER, TOOLS, EXPLORE and YOU. The tab in ink is where you are.
Across the top, the breadcrumbs say where you are inside a tab — BASECAMP › MOUNTAIN BIKING › GALBRAITH MOUNTAIN — and every word before the last is a tap back. The edge swipe goes back one step too.
Explore is the world by geography. EARTH opens the continents, then the countries with stations, then a country's states or provinces; a state holds its waters (the rivers whole, the lakes, the salt water and a map of its stations), its mountains, its national parks, its recreation and the state atlas. The card at the top picks up where you are.
FEATURES are the deep dives: the Great Lakes, the Alps, the Himalaya and the Journeys — the PCT, the CDT, the AT, the JMT and the Wonderland, each with its sections to keep for the days out of signal.
Tap any station for its own screen, and any water, mountain or park for a Place with everything on it. A mountain Place that is one of the volcanoes USGS watches carries a VOLCANO row with the observatory's colour and alert level, or GREEN · NORMAL.
Beyond the United States each country's stations are what its agencies publish: Canada's tide stations and gauges, England's rivers, Norway's and the Netherlands' tides, and more, with the weather from whoever forecasts there. Where a source stops at a border the screen says so.
A Place is a spot with the stations around it. Its scene is the hero — the weather over the water, or a mountain in section, a harbour with its dock, a lake with its staff — and the rows under it are the readings: WATER, WEATHER NOW, SUN, MOON, then each station's module.
The star keeps a Place in FAVORITES; the house names it Home. Every row that names a station is a door to that station's screen.
Basecamp is where you stand, and the page the app opens on. At the top your place and EMERGENCY; the weather row — NOW, WIND, PRECIP, MOON, SUN — each a tap into Weather; the door to Weather Home; BACK BY and START TRACK; then I WANT TO, every activity grouped: watersports, biking, trails, snow, casual, climbing and off-road. The ones in orange have their pages built out.
An activity opens its page: the measured strip for it, WEATHER DETAIL over the page, LOCAL EVENTS and START TRACK, and LOCAL PLACES nearest first. Surf opens the surf places, each with THE SWELL and THE BREAKS; Mountain biking the riding areas with their trails in 3D; Hiking the routes with their profile; Ski / board the ski areas with their runs, lifts, backcountry and snow forecast.
Location is used on the phone and never sent anywhere. Precise Location gives you distances; approximate gives you the order.
WEATHER is the second tab. The scene is the hero with the reading in its face — the temperature, the high and the low — and the sheet under it: the place and the sky, the five tiles, the hours, then six cards, each a door to a page of its own: THE WEEK, MAPS (radar, rain, snow, wind, air, and more), FORECASTS (the Weather Service's own words for the zone), WIND (the moving wind over the terrain and the continent), SKY (the sun, the moon and the astronomy) and CHARTS (the transport, the figures, the charts, the marine text and the sources).
CHANGE ▾ chooses whose weather it is: your location, your Home, a favorite, or any place by name. The house beside the speaker is the weather home — filled green, the app opens here, on the place chosen; one tap flips it. With location declined, the chooser opens on its own so the page is never empty. A widget for the home and lock screens shows the same place — add it from the home screen's widget gallery under Cherry O.
Every figure is the National Weather Service's own grid for that point, Environment Canada's in Canada, MET Norway's where neither has a grid, and USNO's day. FIRES appears above the cards when NASA's EONET lists a wildfire open within reach.
The scene is the place itself. The skyline is the real one from USGS's terrain, near and far, with the big peaks named on it; the water in front is there only when a gauge stands within reach; a town draws as a town; and the ground under your feet is what the land-cover survey says it is. Drag the scene to look around the whole circle; the compass strip along the top says which way. ACTIVE turns it with the phone as you turn, the sun and the moon standing at their true bearings; PLAY plays the day. The buttons beside the sheet's handle raise and lower it a step at a time.
Raise the phone to a ridge and Active Explorer names what you are looking at — every summit, lake and stream in view, placed by bearing and height on USGS's own terrain. The compass and the tilt turn the view; the range card across the head shows the whole skyline with your window on it.
Tap a name and its screen opens. FROM THE PIN explores from any pin dropped on a map instead of your fix; CAMERA lays the marks over the frame.
SKY lays the sun, moon, planets and stars over the same skyline, from USNO. A body behind a ridge is drawn faint and says so. Tap a body for where it stands.
On the Sky pane and every Astronomy screen an AURORA row reads NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center: the chance of aurora in the hour ahead at that coordinate, tonight's highest Kp with its storm word, and Kp now. A chance needs a dark, clear north; the cloud is the forecast's business.
Outside the United States the ground comes from open terrain tiles and the names from OpenStreetMap — the Alps, the Andes, the Himalaya. In a crowded range the highest fourteen summits in view are named; the rest stand as dots, named on a tap.
Every station has a screen of its own. The scene is the hero: a tide gauge is a pier with the water at the published level, the next low and high in the face, and a bracket at the left edge marking the station's mean tides — MLLW, mean sea level, mean high water — so you can see how the present tide stands against the usual ones (EST, in orange, where the station publishes no datums and the app has taken the means of this week's turns); a current station is the channel with the published column of speeds below the surface; a buoy rides its own measured sea; a lake and a river stand on their own staff; a snow station is a stake in a clearing.
The transport under the scene plays the published curve forward and back — a week each way for the tides and currents, as far as the forecast reaches for a river. PLAY and NOW.
The rows under the sheet are the figures: the outlet's own, then WEATHER NOW, SUN and MOON. Every row says whose figure it is and when it was read. EXPORT writes every series on the screen to a CSV for the share sheet.
TOOLS › SKY is the sky over you — the Sun, the Moon and Astronomy: first light, sunrise, sunset, last light; the phase and illumination; what is above the horizon now — all from the U.S. Naval Observatory. On Weather the SUN and MOON tiles and the SKY card open the same for the place you are looking at. Open in Active Explorer stands the sky up over the skyline.
TOOLS holds the instruments, all on one page, each button one tool: BACK BY and START TRACK; ACTIVE, SKY and IDENTIFY; LIVE VIEW, COMPASS and BLACK/WHITE OUT; TILT, BUBBLES and EMERGENCY; and Cherry Picks, parked for a later release.
LIVE VIEW is the map full screen with you on it as a rose: TOPO (USGS's topographic map), IMAGERY or 3D under it, and CHART (NOAA's nautical chart, not for navigation) and RADAR (NWS) over it. KEEP → keeps the area around a point for a day out of signal; the kept trips are under YOU › HOW TO & PREFS › Data. Tap the map to choose a point: the bearing, distance and climb to it, and the trail route with turn-by-turn cues when the trails join. Nothing is a promised path — the app names the route and its limits.
ACTIVE on Live View turns the map so the way you face is up, and one large arrow over you points the way along the trail you stand on — it learns which way you are going from your first steps, names a junction and lets you choose, says when the trail data ends, and points you back to the trail when you have left it. At a ski area the runs and lifts draw on the map, green, blue and black. COMPASS is the same arrow and words without the map. BLACK/WHITE OUT is the ground itself from USGS's height grid, with you standing on it — the map draped over it, or CONTOURS alone for a whiteout or the dark — turned by the compass and tilted with the phone.
Abroad, where USGS's map stops, Live View draws Apple's map with OpenStreetMap's paths over it.
IDENTIFY takes a picture of a plant, a tree or an animal and names it on the phone: Apple's Look Up puts its leaf mark on the picture when it recognises something, and the phone's own classifier gives a reading with a confidence, an estimate every time. The app keeps no photo and sends nothing. TILT is a level for the tent, an altimeter, and a car glyph for a slope.
EMERGENCY holds your person — one contact chosen from your contacts and kept on this phone, and on your Apple Watch if you have one (the name and the number go from this phone straight to the Watch, over Apple's link between the two, so a passed check-in can be sent from the wrist; they go nowhere else, and we never receive them) — with CALL, TEXT MY LOCATION to them, CALL 911, and a check-in: a return time you set, and if it passes uncleared, a band with the message to send to your person. BUBBLES — also by "Hey Siri, Bubbles" or the Action Button — says which way is up from the phone's own gravity, for under snow or under water. Nothing runs in the background; the phone sends nothing on its own.
START TRACK anywhere — Basecamp, YOU, Tools, a place's page — and the track is recording at once. Started from a place's page it already knows what and where. Started anywhere else it asks WHAT ARE YOU DOING?: a place the app knows within a short walk comes first, the activity and the place in one tap (SPIN · CycleBar, CLIMB · a crag, SKI / BOARD · a resort); then what you usually do, then every activity, and JUST TRACK. The answer picks your screen, and it can be changed later on the track's page.
The screen fits the activity. Outdoors it is LIVE VIEW: the map with four figures under it — distance, climb, time and cadence on foot; top speed, descent, distance and time riding — and ALL for everything, grouped by where each figure comes from. At a spin bike it is four big figures: watts, rpm, heart rate and time. On a wall or in a gym it is the climbing screen: height now, climbs, height climbed in all and time, from the phone's barometer, and NEXT ROUTE to keep this route and start the next.
A track records with the phone locked — the location indicator is on the whole time — and STOP ends it; PAUSE holds it. An hour without moving and it asks STILL OUT?, with END IT AT the moment you stopped, so a track left running keeps its walk and loses only the idle hours. With signal, the map around you is saved as you go, so it is there when the bars are not; KEEP saves an area for good.
Pair a heart-rate strap, a watch that broadcasts its heart rate, a power meter, a cadence sensor or a smart trainer in Prefs › SENSORS, and it joins every track. Set your weight once in Prefs › YOUR WEIGHT for an estimate of calories, marked est.; an Apple Watch's own measurement replaces it. Airs and turns count on a ride, a board or skis; stumbles, on foot, are a guess.
Photographs, videos and notes go with a track, a pin or a route: TAKE ONE, VIDEO, FROM PHOTOS, or LINK A VIDEO from YouTube or Vimeo. A photograph taken here is also saved full size to your Photos; a video is saved to your Photos and plays from there. DRAW ON IT marks a photograph with Apple's Markup pens — a route line, a hold, the landing — kept apart from the photograph so you can change it later.
YOU › YOUR TRACKS keeps them. A kept track has a page of its own: its map, the figures, the splits, your note, its photographs and videos, THE DAY AT the place — every track there that day with the weather it began in, to share as one picture — LIVE VIEW, EXPORT GPX, EXPORT CSV, and SHARE. Nothing leaves the phone unless you send it, and a shared picture carries no location. Everything you keep is on this phone only: back the phone up (YOU › BACK IT UP).
The phone's own pedometer rides along: steps, floors up and down, and its distance beside the GPS line's, never merged. At a ski area a RIDING row appears: the fastest leg, the runs and the vertical from the line, and from the motion sensors the airs and the turns.
Your iPhone alone measures a great deal: distance, pace, speed and the line you took (GPS, which works with no signal); the climb up and down, the high point and the grade (the published ground under each fix); steps, walking and running cadence and floors (its motion sensor, with the phone on you); airs and turns on a ride, a board or skis; and climbs and height on a wall (its barometer, indoors or out). Calories are an estimate without a watch — a published formula run on your distance, climb and time at a weight you set once in Prefs, and every screen marks it est.
A watch adds your heart rate, heart-rate zones and measured calories. Apple Watch is the one watch the app runs on: a track started on the Watch records with its own GPS, shows your heart rate and calories on the wrist, and brings them to the phone with the track. Other watches — Garmin, Polar, Suunto, COROS, Wahoo — can send their heart rate to the phone live: turn on Broadcast Heart Rate (Garmin) or HR sensor mode (Polar) on the watch, then pair it in Prefs › SENSORS. Any chest strap does the same. Fitbit does not broadcast its heart rate, so it cannot.
A sensor adds what no watch measures. Pedalling cadence (rpm) and power (watts) come from the bike: a smart trainer or smart bike, a spin bike that broadcasts over Bluetooth, power-meter pedals, or a clip-on cadence sensor on the crank or shoe for a gym bike with none. Pair it once in Prefs › SENSORS and it joins every track and spin session, recording with the phone locked. Peloton and Echelon bikes need an adapter; their own formats are closed.
Everything is read straight from the device to your phone and kept with the track, in the standard formats the Bluetooth group publishes. No account, no company's app, and nothing sent to us. None of these figures is medical information: ask a doctor before training hard, and stop if something feels wrong.
Cherry Picks — a trip with dates, and a ledger for every day of it — is parked for a later release. Its button stands on TOOLS for now.
Everything fetched is kept on the phone and shown as of its time when there is no signal. Kept trips and kept areas hold whole places. Prefs › Data lists what is kept by trip with its size, the cache with its cap, and a CLEAR.
The switch at the top of Prefs takes the app offline on purpose; every row then says AS OF and the time.
The orange share mark beside the home and favorite marks on any outlet or Place takes a picture of the page — the name, the moment and its rows — for the share sheet. TEXT MY LOCATION under Emergency opens Messages with your coordinate, its accuracy, your elevation and an Apple Maps link, addressed to your person if you have chosen one; you read it and send. The app sends nothing on its own.
EXPORT on any outlet's sheet writes every series the screen holds — as published, one row per sample, with the station, the source, the local time and the unit — to a CSV handed to the share sheet.
Nothing is sent by the app; the share sheet is yours.
Every nine minutes or so Sasquatch walks the treeline of the mountain scene and leaves prints, then comes back on the far flank, climbs to the summit while the climbers are off the mountain, and slides down on his heels; on the snow scene he walks the treeline; on Fridays the Cherry Outside blimp crosses the weather scene's sky; on the plains a tumbleweed rolls when the wind is up; climbers summit Rainier and an eagle passes. None of it is data and none of it is in the count. Prefs › Sasquatch in the scenes and Fun in the scenes turn them off.
The native wildlife, too: the region's own animals, one at a time, in season, by day — the salmon of the Northwest under the pier in their running months, a pod of orca on the far water, an osprey's dive, a manatee under a Gulf pier, dolphins, loons, moose, a marmot on a ledge — sixteen regions from Hawaii to the Alps. On the Pennsylvania and New Jersey docks a bare-chested runner with a great head of black hair comes in along the deck, shadow boxes by the gauge house, turns and runs back off. Flair, never data.
Your Apple Watch follows this phone: it opens on the weather for the place Weather Home is pointed at (Prefs › Watch leads with changes that), then the stations you have chosen here. It asks the forecast agency itself when you raise it to look, and does nothing while your wrist is down.
One swipe under the lead page is TRACK. START TRACK records with the Watch's own GPS, phone or no phone. The first START asks, on the Watch, for its Location and for Apple Health — a Watch keeps its GPS running with the wrist down only inside a workout, and a workout is Health's. Written to Health: one workout with its kind, start and end, its distance, its route and its active energy, so Fitness shows the map and the miles. Read from Health: the heart rate and active energy of that workout, shown on the Watch and kept with the track, and nothing else. Decline Health and the track still records, but only while the screen is on. While it records the page is three across: the figures, the line north up with a scale bar, and PAUSE, HOLD TO END and BACK BY. At END the track goes to this phone's tracks over Apple's link, and the Watch drops its copy once the phone has it.
BACK BY is the same check-in as the phone's: set or cleared on either, it changes on both. When the time passes, the Watch shows BACK BY · PASSED with I'M BACK and SEND TO your person. SEND opens Messages on the Watch to your person's number with the message written — the time you set and your track's last position — and you press send; the app sends nothing on its own. That is why your person's name and number are kept on the Watch as well as the phone. The Watch taps your wrist at the time only while a track is recording; with no track running it shows the passed check-in the next time you raise it.
Connection, Location, Units (the phone's, or feet and miles, or metres and km), Appearance, Reduce animation complexity, the fun, Sounds (a tick, a tone on playback, spoken cues on the trail, the forecast read aloud), the compass, the level's calibration, the alerts, Data, the partners with thanks, the Terms, and About — with Permissions, explained again (the setup pages that follow the Terms: what is asked, why, where it goes, and what happens if you say no) and this How To.
No ads. No account and no server of ours. Nothing collected but the visitor reports you choose to send — a few taps about a place, anonymous, gone after 48 hours, yours to delete under YOU › Your reports. Your location stays on the phone; the one exception, said plainly in the Terms, is Apple's geocoder naming the spot you stand on. Every figure is an agency's own and says so.