HuntFix
Features
HuntFix is a field tool, not a hunting ecosystem. There is no ballistics calculator, no wind model, no weather, no social feed and no property management. What is here is what serves one question: where was that animal, and how do I get to it?
Taking the measurement, in the few seconds you have after the shot.
The live camera with a centred reticle, so you are aiming the phone at the animal rather than guessing. Zoom runs 1×, 2×, 5× and 10× — the 5× reaches the telephoto lens optically — and the crop is about the optical centre, so the reticle stays on the sight line at every zoom.
Added after a distant target proved unidentifiable at 1×.
The bearing comes from the phone's full attitude, averaged over a second, not from the raw compass. On the phone it held steady to a couple of tenths of a degree where the plain compass reading scattered by two — steadiness, not accuracy.
Read from the phone's own sensors, or typed in from a rangefinder that reports inclination, or entered by hand. Whichever you choose is remembered.
Your position is taken from the first fresh fix and then only improves while you stand still: a better fix replaces it, a worse one does not, and a fresh fix takes over before it can go stale. Once you lock the target, nothing replaces it.
Poor GPS, a compass the phone does not trust, an uncalibrated magnetometer, an unsteady hand — each is said plainly on the sight screen. None of them stops you locking the target. You are the one standing there; the app's job is to tell you what it knows, not to refuse.
At the moment you lock the target, HuntFix saves a JPEG of exactly what the reticle was on, at the zoom you were using. Fire and forget — the flow never waits for it — and it is there on the target afterwards, which is often the thing that actually identifies the spot.
Big keys, no system keyboard, no autocorrect, usable with cold hands. Metres or yards, switched on the spot and remembered.
Rangefinders differ: some give the straight-line distance, some already correct it for the angle. HuntFix asks which yours gave you and explains why in one line, so the correction is never applied twice.
Marking a target is waypoint projection — what a Garmin calls Project Waypoint — solved on the WGS84 ellipsoid with Vincenty's formula and checked against a published survey baseline to two centimetres over fifty-five kilometres.
Zero, negative, absurd and impossible inputs are rejected with a message that says what is wrong. Nothing is silently coerced into a number that would produce a confident, wrong target.
The GPS error, the compass confidence, the angle confidence and the steadiness of your hold are carried through the calculation, horizontal and vertical kept separate, and come out as the size and shape of the area to search.
If the phone had no trustworthy altitude for where you were standing, it cannot know the altitude of the target either. In that case the app shows the relative height difference and a dash for the absolute figure, with a line saying why.
Your shot position, the target, the line between them and the uncertainty drawn as an ellipse — wider across the line of sight than along it, because that is the shape a bearing error actually makes. Map, Satellite or Hybrid.
Range, bearing, angle, elevation, both coordinates, and the likely zone split into across-the-line and along-the-line. Nothing is hidden behind a paid tier.
If you can see on the map that the animal is on the other side of the creek, drag the map under the pin and set it there. The adjusted position is stored beside the calculated one, never over it, and the record shows how far it moved.
Deer, tahr, chamois, pig and the rest — one tap, optional, and the pin takes the name.
Got it wrong, or want a second measurement? Re-sight starts a new sighting rather than editing the old one. What was measured stays measured.
Where you took the shot from is saved as its own waypoint. You can navigate back to it as easily as to the animal — useful when you left a pack, and useful when you want to re-sight from exactly the same place.
A big arrow and a big distance are the primary display. The map is secondary and is allowed to be blank — out of reception the app still knows everything it needs to.
Direction comes from your GPS course when you are actually moving, and from the compass when you are not. When there is no trustworthy heading at all, the arrow goes grey and says so rather than pointing confidently at nothing.
Valley navigation means contouring, sidling and backtracking. The app never tells you that you are going the wrong way, because it does not know the country. The distance going up is shown as a bigger number and nothing else.
Inside a hundred metres the distance grows on screen, and the third tile becomes the radius of the zone you should be searching — your target's uncertainty combined with your current GPS accuracy. A line tells you plainly when you are inside it.
Every five metres or so while the navigation screen is open, so the route you actually walked is on the map — which matters most on the way back out, in the dark, with weight on your back.
A tap when you come into alignment, and a distinct buzz at 100, 50 and 20 metres. The alerts fire once and re-arm only if you go well back out again, so they never nag.
While you are navigating, the phone does not sleep in your hand.
Recovered, Not found, or keep it active and come back tomorrow. The record is yours; the app does not judge it and — deliberately — does not charge differently for it.
The sighting as measured, the solution derived from it, the photo, the trail you walked, the status, your notes, and the likely-zone breakdown. Kept indefinitely.
Every target, sighting, photo and trail is copied to the private storage of the Apple Account already on your phone, so a lost or replaced phone does not lose your record. Sign in on a new iPhone and they are there.
It is your iCloud, not a service of mine: I have no server and no way to read it. Settings shows when the last backup finished, and lets you turn it off or delete the iCloud copy. Nothing in the app waits for it.
Every animal you mark Recovered counts, with a badge at 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50 and 100 — First Fix through to Hundred Faces.
It is your record rather than a verified one, and the app says so: HuntFix has no way of knowing whether you found the animal, only that you tapped the button on the hill. The count comes straight from your saved targets, so it follows your backup to a new phone.
GPX export with the target, the shot position and the track. Open in Apple Maps. Copy the coordinates. A backup file of everything, for a copy that lives outside Apple. No lock on any of it.
With the field-test tools turned on in Settings → Field testing, stand where the animal actually was and tap I'm at the target, or type the true position in. HuntFix then shows the miss distance and the bearing, distance, angle and vertical errors against what it calculated — and a summary across every test, exportable as CSV.
This is the tooling that turns "how accurate is it?" into a measured answer instead of a claim.
Units, range type and angle source; light, dark or follow iOS. Turn on the field-test tools and you also get a sensor screen that shows every bearing and angle source side by side, with a HOLD button so a reading can be written down.
Dark keeps your night vision on a pre-dawn climb. Light is easier to read with the sun straight on the screen. HuntFix follows iOS, or you can pin it either way in Settings — and the walkthrough on this site lets you see both.
Some of this may come later. None of it comes before the app does the one thing well.
Ballistics, wind, weather, shot placement, route planning, live tracking, social features, property management, and any kind of account.
Triangulating a target from two sightings; terrain intersection using an elevation model; Bluetooth rangefinders that send the range across on their own; KML export; an Apple Watch app for the arrow.
Anything with a running cost behind it — premium topographic maps, terrain elevation data, sharing targets with a hunting party. If they are built they will be offered on their own terms and never take away anything already bought.