The Top 10 Apps For Serious Hunters

Whether you’re hunting deer, bear, upland birds, or waterfowl, you want to have every edge you can. You buy ScentLok camouflaged clothes, great binoculars, spotting scopes, and the best weaponry you can. You scout your hunting locations with care, placing game cameras throughout to find out where the animals are traveling and bedding down. Do you ever think about the apps on your smartphone, though?

If not, now’s the time to start planning what apps you can add to your mobile device to give you an even better advantage in the bush. With that in mind, here are the top ten apps you can download to your iPhone or Android device before that next big hunt.

Related reading: best crossbow recommendations.

10. AccuWeather – Weather for Life

Before you head out for your hunt, you should check the weather conditions. Sure, your mobile device probably has a weather app pre-loaded, but this free, award-winning app provides features you won’t find in that stock weather program. You can find minute-by-minute forecasts, along with crowdsourced weather information reported by people actually near where you’re going to be hunting, not airports 20 miles away.

• Compatiblity: iPhone (supports Apple Watch) and Android (supports Android Wear)
• Price: Free, with in-app purchases to remove ads
• iTunes App Store
• Google Play Store

9. Google Earth

Before you go hunting, you want to scout the terrain. With Google Earth, you can do some of that without even leaving the comfort of your living room. Scout out public or private land, scan aerials for potential deer stand locations, and identify those crucial terrain features like pinch-points, funnels, and other natural travel corridors with just a tap on the screen.

• Compatiblity: iPhone and Android
• Price: Free
• iTunes App Store
• Google Play Store

8. SAS Survival Guide

Survival guides are things that you always hope you won’t need, but if you don’t have one … you’re bound to regret it someday. For more than 20 years, the SAS Survival Guide has been considered the definitive guide to surviving any situation Mother Nature can throw at you. It provides you with the full text of John “Lofty” Wiseman’s bestselling book, 16 videos providing survival tips, and photo galleries of knots and animal tracks, as well as images of edible, medicinal, and poisonous plants, sea creatures, and snakes. It also includes a Morse Code signalling device, survival checklist, sun compass, and a comprehensive first aid section.

• • Compatibility: iPhone and Android
  • Price: $5.99

 

• iTunes App Store
• Google Play Store

7. iSolunar Hunting & Fishing Times

Have you ever wondered when the best time was to head out to the deer stand or fishing hole? With iSolunar, you’ll get peak feeding and activity times for your favorite locations in easy-to-read tables without any complicated graphics. The app will provide you with a calendar for checking solunar data in advance, and it can send results via text message. You can also check sunrise and sunset times, along with a full range of moon information.

• • Compatibility: iPhone only
  • Price: $4.99

 

• iTunes App Store

6. ArcheryPal

When you’re training for archery season, or when you’re in the middle of it, you want every boost you can get for the challenge of nabbing that buck with your trusty bow and arrow. With ArcheryPal, you can determine whether your arrows are properly balanced for optimum flight, as well as calculate your arrow speed and kinetic energy. You can also graphically log your shooting sesions, as well as track your 3-D shoots. ArcheryPal also lets you save waypoints, which it calls hotspots, so you can easily get back to your treestand early in the morning.

• Compatibility: iPhone only
• Price: $4.99
• iTunes App Store

5. Deer Calls & Tactics

One of the crucial factors of a successful deer hunt is knowing the calls. This app provides hunters with 12 of the most effective deer calls and sounds, along with tips and tactics for each. It includes the contact call, doe grunt, doe bleat, doe estrus bleat, breeding bellow, buck grunt, buck bawl, tending grunt, tending click-grunt, snort-wheeze, and rattling. The app also provides you with the local rut forecast, rut phase description and dates, and tactics and tips for each phase of the rut.

• Compatibility: iPhone and Android
• Price: $1.99
• iTunes App Store
• Google Play Store

4. Shot Simulator

Knowing your shot was dead-on perfect is one of the best feelings you can have as a bowhunter. The problem is, how do you know for sure? Shot Simulator helps with that by recreating the scenario and shot to match your hit. Feed in the data, and the simulator will give you a look inside the deer to determine what vital organs were hit. Detailed instructions based on your arrow’s flight path in the simulator will give you real-world instructions on how to best track and recover your deer, making it easier to find and claim your trophy. The only downside to this app is that it hasn’t been updated in six years.

• Compatibility: iPhone only
• Price: $4.99
• iTunes App Store

3. HUNT App: Public/Private Lands & Hunting GPS Maps

Turn your mobile device into a land identification system with this app. It’s a fully-functioning GPS app, but it’s also much more. You can check public and private boundaries as well as find the owner’s names for properties. You’ll be able to see hunting units, roads and trails, real-time weather, and more. With the free download, you get plenty of features like aerial imagery, 24K topographical maps, and hunting units or game management units for general game species in all 50 states. You can also mark waypoints, measure distances between treestands and blinds, and plenty of other features. With a premium state membership, you can also get access to proprietary maps developed by a specialized GIS team that provides you with landowner names and property boundaries in select counties. With the premium subscription, you also gain the ability to download maps for offline use. When you first install the app, you will get a seven-day trial to a Premium State Membership, so you can try it before you buy it.

• Compatibility: iPhone and Android
• Price: Free (with in-app purchase for Premium Subscriptions)
• iTunes App Store
• Google Play Store

2. Where2Hunt – GPS Hunting App to see Hunters

If you want to prevent other deer, turkey, or elk hunters from randomly walking up on the hunting spot you’ve so painstakingly located, this app can help. It acts as a digital beacon telling other hunters to stay away. The app will also help you figure out whether or not it’s worth stepping onto that public land parcel, since it can tell you how many other hunters have already claimed their spot. Where2Hunt features real-time GPS tracking, letting you know where other hunters are before you see them. You can also use the private group feature to keep track of the rest of the members of your hunting party.

• • Compatibility: iPhone and Android
  • Price: Free (with in-app purchase for PRO version)
  • iTunes App Store

 

• Google Play Store

1. GEO-PAK Hunt

This app may very well be the only all-in-one app I’ve ever come across for hunting. The only thing it’s really missing is archery data, but it includes just about everything else. GEO-PAK provides you with solunar and weather information, along with wind speed and direction. It can pull in animal data from your trail cameras. The app can also integrate with trackers to know where your dogs are, and it functions offline using Smart GEOGrid to help you know where your hunting buddies are. GEO-PAK allows you to view your group members’ position, speed, direction, and status (ready, wait, searching, using dog, leaving, and SOS). The app is free to download, but many of the features require a premium subscription of $19.99 per year, a bargain considering all that the app is capable of.

• • Compatibility: iPhone and Android
  • Price: Free (with in-app purchase for Premium Subscription)

 

• • iTunes App Store

 

• Google Play Store

Conclusion

These are my favorite apps for making the most of my hunts, and I think they’ll quickly become yours, too. Your smartphone is simply too powerful to keep relegating it to sit in your pocket, neglected and unused throughout your entire hunt. Make the most of the supercomputer you carry around with you anyways, and up your hunting game a notch (or 10) by using these apps.