Changelog
What's new
Everything that has shipped, on the app and the website, back to the first release in May. The catalogue ships in numbered versions (v172 today); new changes land here as they go live.
A tour rebuilt, and ten roads that belonged somewhere
- The Georgian Three was a three-day chain that did not actually connect: it asked you to drive between places that are not a day apart. Georgia’s three great roads are genuinely far from each other, so it is now five days, with two of them spent getting between regions and no pretence that you can drive them all in three.
- Ten roads were in the catalogue but in no collection, so they were hard to stumble on. They now sit in the right places, including three new collections: Wine Country Roads, Sri Lanka’s Hill Country and The Vosges.
- The Forcola di Livigno is traced along the real road out of Livigno, and the Al Hada road now carries all 93 of its bends.
The catalogue audit: 147 junk pins gone, and a lot of honest rewriting
- I pointed a series of audits at the whole catalogue and then fixed what they found. Points of interest took the worst of it: 147 pins were junk, generic or plain wrong, so they are gone, and the eighteen roads that emptied out have real, named places back on them.
- More lines re-traced to the road people actually mean. The Ring of Kerry was the one genuinely wrong line in the catalogue and is now correct; Trollstigen climbs its 852 m pass instead of stopping short; the Ovit road goes over the pass rather than through the tunnel.
- About ninety road descriptions were rewritten. Sixteen clusters of near-identical copy-paste prose are gone, difficulty ratings were re-tiered so they mean the same thing everywhere, hazards were checked road by road, and the diacritics that had been quietly stripped from road and place names are back.
Roads traced to their true extent
- Some lines stopped short of the best part, so I have been re-tracing them from the source. The Mangart road now climbs all the way to its saddle car park, the highest road in Slovenia; the Biokovo road reaches the summit of Sveti Jure high above the Adriatic; the Col du Galibier goes over the col rather than through the tunnel beneath it.
- Every elevation profile is rebuilt from sharper terrain data, so the climbs, descents and gradients you see belong to the road, not the mountain above a tunnel.
- A copy accuracy pass across the catalogue, correcting stray summit heights, lengths and place names against real sources, and rewriting flatter descriptions in plain, opinionated English.
- New behind-the-scenes checks read every road’s line, elevation and words against its own geometry and flag anything that disagrees, so the catalogue keeps itself honest as it grows.
Plan a trip without leaving the app
- You can build a trip in the app now. Until this release the Trips tab could show you a trip and drive you along it, but the only way to make one was on the website. Start from scratch, or take a Grand Tour and make it yours, picking roads with Browse’s own search and filters. No sign-in required to plan one.
- The app now speaks German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, right through the paywall, Settings, the stat captions, the widgets and the Live Activity. Road names and descriptions stay in English on purpose.
- Roads that sit on top of each other on the map are finally tappable. Winnats Pass buried inside Mam Tor, Tal-y-llyn inside Cadair Idris: tap the shared tarmac and you get a picker listing every road on that stretch, instead of always landing on the same one.
The Window, and a corners chart
- The Window is the big one. Routes watches the forecast for the roads you have saved and tells you the moment one of them turns perfect, along the lines of "Buttertubs looks perfect on Saturday". It only fires when a road crosses into a great day, never more than one notification a day, and a road that has just fired rests for five days. There is a weekends-only toggle in Account.
- Road pages gained a Corners card: a chart of where the corners intensify along the road, built as a deliberate twin of the elevation chart below it. The elevation chart now draws itself in the first time you scroll to it, and crossing into a new badge drops a quiet "Badge earned" card onto the page.
- Four new Grand Tours, the Touge in Japan, the Picos, the South Island and the Ring in Iceland, plus more world-famous roads and the Last Frontier and Racing Royalty collections. The app chrome also got its first pass of German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese.
The map comes alive
- The map now tracks your pinch continuously: clusters and lines move with the gesture instead of snapping into place when you let go. Dense areas like Wales and Switzerland stopped lagging, and cluster bubbles split and merge with a real animation rather than popping.
- Tapping is far better aimed. It measures to the road line itself rather than to its nearest corner point, a cluster bubble no longer steals a tap from the road under your finger, and tapping empty map deselects the way every other map does. The locate button pulses while it is finding you, and actually tells you when it fails.
- The lit line in the 3D fly-by was rebuilt so it stays glued to the moving dot without dropping frames, and drive recording no longer freezes after a GPS gap of more than five kilometres.
Share cards worth sharing
- Road and drive-recap share cards now render the road framed on its own satellite imagery with the route line drawn over it, plus a strip showing where the corners bunch up. They used to be a flat gradient.
- Drive Mode tells you plainly that it keeps recording with the screen locked, so you can stop babysitting the phone on a drive.
- Tour links from bestdrivingroads.com open straight in the app now, and the share button stopped popping and fading in on the road sheet.
Fixes and polish
- Mostly small fixes. Drive Mode in landscape on a short iPhone was pushing the End drive button off the screen with no way to scroll to it, which is exactly the sort of thing that only bites you in the car. Long collection and tour titles also stopped clipping at accessibility text sizes, and "Demanding" no longer wraps onto two lines in Passport.
- On iPad, the Collections "See all" screen fills the width as a grid instead of cropping cards at the edge, and the per-day button on a Grand Tour now lines up with its road cards.
Public profiles
- Claim a username and share a public profile of the roads you have saved and driven, on the app and the web.
- Your profile shows a photo, your driven and saved roads, your trips and your stats.
- Turn it on or off any time; it is private until you choose to share it.
Two new collections, and a catalogue that checks itself
- New collections: Volcano Roads (Etna, Teide, Haleakala, Crater Lake and more) and Gravel Epics (the Dempster, Sani Pass, the Pamir Highway and other great unpaved adventures).
- A full accuracy pass across every road, verified against real sources, correcting stray facts, place names and road numbers so the catalogue stays honest.
- The Conditions section on road pages is cleaner, with the week ahead and the best day to drive read at a glance.
Seasons, search and the hairpin census
- New: per-pass season pages. Ask 'is the Stelvio open?' and get the typical season, my road notes and live summit weather for every pass I track.
- New: the hairpin census. 4,012 hairpins counted from real geometry, ranked. The legends round up; I measure.
- The homepage now opens with roads at their best this month.
- Road pages show the week ahead at a glance, with the best driving day picked out.
- Search anywhere with the magnifier or Cmd+K, now fully keyboard and screen-reader friendly.
- The all-roads directory loads three times lighter.
Find roads near you
- New: driving roads near a city. 84 cities worldwide, each listing every catalogued road within 100 miles, closest first.
- New: state pages for the US. California, North Carolina, Colorado and nine more get their own guides.
- Collections now open with a Start Here row, and the biggest country pages lead with a ten-road shortlist.
- Android and desktop visitors hitting an app link can now leave their email instead of a dead end.
- The newsletter form now lives on the homepage and every road page.
Road pages, version two
- Save, mark as driven, add to trip and share, now on every road page. Saves sync with the app and your public profile.
- Quick answers on every road: how long it takes, how hard it is, when to go, and tolls where they apply.
- Every road page now shows its verified-route line and sources, and carries an honest last-updated date for search engines.
- Guides now carry a byline and an updated date.
- New About page explaining how roads get verified, and this changelog.
- A sticky bar on phones keeps directions and the app link to hand while you read.
- Fixed the broken app link on shared profile and trip pages.
Accounts, and Pro that follows you
- Sign in with Apple, Google or email to sync your saved roads, driven log and trips across every device.
- Your data is scoped to your account and yours alone.
- Buy Pro once and it follows your account, so it is there on a new phone or on the web.
The fly-by goes underground
- On roads that genuinely tunnel, the fly-by dot now fades out at the portal and reappears at the far side, and the route line gaps through the bore with it. The camera keeps flying the real terrain above, which is honest and looks far better than flattening the mountain.
- The opening zoom, from the framed overview down to the start line, is one continuous move now. It used to stall while terrain tiles loaded and then jump.
- I fact-checked 428 roads and fixed 18 wrong or out of date claims, things like Sankaber’s height and Halsema losing its Philippines-highest title back in 2019. Llogara was re-traced onto the scenic pass too, because that is the famous drive, not the tunnel.
Proper accounts
- Sign in with Apple, Google or email, and your saved roads follow you. There is a Sign-in methods screen showing which providers are linked, and deleting your account now genuinely deletes it on the server rather than just wiping the phone.
- Whatever you had saved locally migrates into the account the first time you sign in, so nothing is lost. Passport also lists your driven roads by when you marked them driven, newest first, instead of in catalogue order.
- Fly-by landmarks are drawn as real map annotations draped on the terrain now, so they sit on the ground rather than floating above it.
Plan a road trip on the web
- New on bestdrivingroads.com: a trip planner. Drag roads into days, auto-arrange the order for the shortest run, and open the result in Apple or Google Maps.
- Sign in and your trips sync to your account and into the app.
- Works without an account too, saved in your browser until you are ready.
Fly-by landmarks come back
- Points of interest had stopped rendering in the 3D fly-by entirely. They are back, and the badges no longer jitter as the camera moves.
- I spent a while trying to make the tab bar shrink away and spring back on scroll, the way Reddit does. iOS 26 will not do it cleanly, so I dropped the whole thing. The tab bar is simply always there now, which is the better answer anyway.
- The launch splash shows on every cold launch but never when you come back from the background, and Grand Tour day colours and the Collections shelves now come from the catalogue instead of being hardcoded.
The catalogue goes global
- New roads across nine more countries, taking the catalogue past 85 countries worldwide.
- Browse by country, grouped by region, so the whole world of great roads is a tap away.
- Road-sign shields now match each country’s real signage.
Browse gets a proper shape
- Browse now groups countries into continent shelves, and Collections sit on regional shelves keeping their real tints, instead of one flat wall of cards. A road in a country I had not modelled shows its actual country name too, so no more "Rest of the world" stamped on a Namibian road.
- Every big title moved to Stack Sans, the display face from the website, so the app and the site finally look related. Road shields are drawn from the catalogue as well, which means a new country arrives with the right shield rather than a generic one.
- Grand Tour overview maps tap to expand full screen, and account rows now match the row height Apple uses in Settings.
The website's best bits, in the app
- I ported four things straight over from the website: Guides, which is twelve ranked lists like highest passes, most hairpins, steepest and best coastal; Nearby roads on every road page; editorial intros on country pages; and an "In these Grand Tours" section so you can see which holiday a road belongs to.
- The satellite toggle now carries everywhere instead of living only on the Map tab. Card thumbnails, the road page hero, the expanded map, and the Passport and tour overview maps all follow it.
- Passport got a trim: the driven-roads map is gone, driven roads moved up the page, and Challenges only show the ones you have actually started. Pro members also get a membership card with their plan and renewal date, and a Manage Subscription row.
Are the high passes open?
- New: a live conditions hub for the great mountain passes, with the typical season and current weather at the summit.
- New: a newsletter. Now and then, one great driving road worth the detour, straight to your inbox.
- Road pages gained live weather at the road itself.
Grand Tours replace Trips
- Trips and Grand Tours became one feature: nine proper driving holidays, each with a cover essay, an honest season window, and day chapters that name the real overnight towns. New ones include the Dolomites in three days, the Route des Grandes Alpes, the Lake District weekend, the great roads of Norway, the Wild Atlantic three and the Great Divide.
- I rebuilt Open in Apple Maps so it actually drives the roads in the order the tour lists them. Before, Maps free-routed between start points, which could skip a pass entirely or run a road backwards.
- Road pages now show which collections a road belongs to, as tappable chips, and the catalogue moved over to bestdrivingroads.com with a fresh Look Around coverage pass.
bestdrivingroads.com is live
- The companion website launches: every road in the catalogue, mapped, with satellite heroes and honest roadbooks, free to browse.
- Nine Grand Tours, multi-day driving holidays built the same way as everything else here, by hand.
- Themed collections, country guides and a full explore map.
A brand moment and a smoother Browse
- A launch moment when you open the app, shown once.
- Open any trip as a multi-stop route straight into Apple Maps.
- Tidier Browse spacing and navigation fixes.
Passport 2.0
- Track your completion region by region, and take on driving challenges.
- A richer record of every road you conquer.
Best days, roads near you, and weather that explains itself
- New (Pro): best-day-to-drive notifications, so you know when the weather lines up for a road you love.
- A Near You rail in Browse, surfacing the great roads closest to you.
- A satellite toggle on the main map.
- The best-day-to-drive forecast now tells you why a day scores well, and warns of ice at altitude.
- Sunset times so you can plan the light.
- Honest weather copy throughout.
Routes launches
- Routes arrives on the App Store: a hand-picked catalogue of the world’s best driving roads, mapped from real geometry with honest roadbooks.
- Every road with its corners, gradients, elevation, character and hazards.
- Offline maps, live weather and 3D fly-bys of the route.
- Free to explore, with Pro for the on-road extras.