Support
HuntFix for iPhone
Hunting for a bit of help?
Shoot me an email — [email protected] — and I will get back to you as soon as I can. HuntFix is made by one person with a day job and a hunting habit, so give it a couple of days before you decide the message went astray.
If it is about your data or your privacy specifically, [email protected] lands in the same place and keeps those messages in their own pile.
Not every hunt goes to plan
If you find a bug, ping me an email when you next get some coverage. I would far rather hear about it than not: I cannot fix what nobody tells me about, and a tool like this only earns trust by being told when it got something wrong.
Leave me a trail I can follow
The more sign there is, the quicker I can work out what happened:
- What you were doing, what happened, and what you expected instead.
- Your iPhone model and iOS version — Settings → General → About.
- The HuntFix version, the last line of Settings.
- A screenshot, if there was something on screen worth seeing.
Things people ask
Where do I get it? On the App Store: HuntFix: Mark & Recover. It is free to download, with two full recoveries; after those, the one-off NZ$19.99 unlock is an in-app purchase. iPhone, iOS 18 or later.
How accurate is it? Mostly it depends on the compass. A phone compass can be out by several degrees; iOS says how confident it is, and the app uses that to size the zone it draws. At 400 metres, one degree is seven metres sideways. So the app gives you a zone, not a point, and shows its size with every target. Search across the slope first — the zone is wider across your line of sight than along it — and use the sight picture to recognise the spot.
It has worked for me on my own hunts. That is experience, not a measurement, so there is no number here until one has been measured against known positions.
The zone is bigger than I expected. The zone is the app being honest. It grows with range, with a poor compass reading, and with a shaky lock. To shrink it: hold the phone steady for a second before you lock, get away from the vehicle, the rifle and anything else made of steel, and lock from as close as you safely can.
The app says the compass is poor. Move away from the vehicle, the rifle, a steel fence or anything magnetic. A phone case with a magnet in it will do it too. If iOS asks you to calibrate by moving the phone in a figure of eight, do it. You can still lock a target with a poor compass — the app will not stop you — but the zone will be wider and it will tell you so.
The bearing shows as "≈240°" instead of a proper number. Same thing. When iOS reports low heading confidence, the app rounds the bearing to the nearest five degrees rather than pretending to a degree it has not got.
Line of sight or horizontal range? Your rangefinder shows one of two distances, and the app must know which. Line of sight is the straight-line laser distance to the target — most rangefinders show this by default. Horizontal (sometimes "angle compensated" or "true horizontal") is a distance the rangefinder has already corrected for the slope. Choose the one your rangefinder displays in Settings → Rangefinder. If the app corrects for angle on a distance that was already corrected, the target will land short on steep shots.
If you are not sure which yours gives you, range something steeply above or below you and compare the two modes. If the numbers differ, it is doing the correction.
Every distance looks about ten per cent out. Check Settings → Units. Metres and yards differ by about that much, and a rangefinder set to yards typed into an app set to metres will do exactly this.
The elevation shows a dash. The phone did not have an altitude for your own position that it was willing to stand behind, so the app will not invent one for the target. It shows you the height difference instead, which it does know. A clearer view of the sky usually fixes it.
The arrow is grey and will not point anywhere. There is no trustworthy heading yet. Walk a few steps — once you are moving, the app uses your GPS course, which is better than a compass held in a swinging hand — or stop and hold the phone flat for a moment so the compass can settle. A grey arrow is deliberate: an arrow that points confidently at nothing is worse than no arrow, because you will follow it.
Does the trail record while the phone is in my pocket? No. Breadcrumbs are recorded only while the navigation screen is open and awake, because HuntFix asks for your location only while you are using it and has no background location permission at all. Lock the phone or switch away and the trail pauses, then picks up where you come back with a straight line across the gap. The screen stays awake by itself while you navigate.
Does it work without reception? Yes. Sighting, ranging, marking, saving and navigating all work with no signal at all. Only the map needs a connection, and the arrow-and-distance view does the job without it.
Where are my photos? Inside the app, with the target they belong to, and in your iCloud backup along with it. They are deliberately kept out of your photo library, so a hunting spot does not end up in a shared album or a screen saver. They are deleted when the target is.
How do I get a target out? Open the target and use Open target in… — Apple Maps, copy the coordinates, or export a GPX file for any mapping app. None of these is locked, whether or not you have bought the app.
Is there a backup? Yes, on by default. HuntFix copies your targets — position, shot position, trail and sight picture — to your own iCloud, so losing a phone does not lose your record. Sign in to the same account on a new iPhone and they are there.
It is your iCloud, not a service of mine: no server, no account, no way for me to read it. Settings → iCloud backup shows when it last ran, and lets you turn it off or delete the iCloud copy.
Nothing waits for it. Marking and navigating work in aeroplane mode; the backup catches up later.
Do I still need to make backup files? It is worth it, and here is the honest reason. iCloud covers the phone going in a river. It does not cover deleting something — a deletion syncs too, so a target you remove is gone from iCloud as well. Settings → Your targets → Create a backup writes every target, sighting, photo and trail into a single file you can put wherever you like, including somewhere that is not Apple's. Restore from a backup reads one back and only adds the targets that are missing, so anything already on the phone is left exactly as it is and restoring twice is harmless. Do it after a good trip.
How do the badges work? Every animal you mark Recovered counts, and there is a badge at 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50 and 100. Settings → Recovered animals shows where you are and what is next.
It is your record, not a verified one — 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 iCloud backup to a new phone, and it drops again if you delete a target.
I have used my two free recoveries. Have I lost anything? No. Nothing is ever deleted or hidden. Every target you have marked stays exactly where it is and stays fully readable, photos, trail, likely-zone breakdown and exports included. An animal already on the ground is never held to ransom either: navigating to a target that already exists keeps working. What the unlock buys is the next one.
Restoring a purchase, or a refund. Settings → Restore purchase brings HuntFix back on a new phone or after a reinstall; make sure the phone is signed in to the Apple Account you bought with. Refunds are handled by Apple, not by me, under Apple's terms: reportaproblem.apple.com, or iOS Settings → your name → Media & Purchases → Purchase History. If something about the app made you want one, I would genuinely like to hear it too.
Is HuntFix Journal part of this? No. HuntFix Journal is a separate app from the same person — a log of your outings and what you shot or caught, blank days included — with its own price and its own support page. HuntFix finds the animal; the Journal keeps the book. Neither needs the other, and buying one gives you nothing in the other.
Will it come to Android, or Apple Watch? Android? Nope — I am an iPhone guy. If you want the app, buy an iPhone. Apple Watch may follow.
Will you add …? Possibly. Already on the list: triangulating a target from two sightings, terrain intersection using an elevation model, Bluetooth rangefinders that send the range across on their own, KML export. Ideas from people who actually hunt carry the most weight, so tell me what you would use.
I found the animal. How do I tell the app where it really was? Turn on Settings → Field testing → Show field-test tools once. Then open the target, stand where the animal was, and tap I'M AT THE TARGET. The app records the true position and shows how far off the estimate was. That is how I learn where the errors come from — and it is entirely optional.
If the app will not open
Your targets are stored separately from the app's code and usually survive an update. Try restarting the phone before anything else.
If you do end up deleting and reinstalling, your targets come back from the iCloud backup as long as it was switched on and the phone is signed in to the same Apple Account. If you had turned it off, they do not — so export the targets you want to keep first.
Reporting a privacy or security concern
Email [email protected]. There is no server of mine and no account — the iCloud backup goes to your own Apple Account, which I cannot read — so the surface for this is small, but if you have found something I want to know about it and I will say plainly what I have done.
HuntFix estimates where a target is; it does not know. It does not identify animals, it does not know whose land you are on, and it does not know the law where you hunt. Those are yours.