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, at the bottom of Settings → About HuntFix.
- A screenshot, if there was something on screen worth seeing.
Things people ask
How accurate is it? Honestly: it depends almost entirely on the compass. A phone compass is good to a few degrees on a good day, and at 400 metres one degree of bearing error is seven metres sideways. So the app does not give you a point; it gives you a zone, and the size of that zone is shown with every target. Search the zone the app draws — it is wider across your line of sight than along it, so work across the slope first — and use the sight picture photo to recognise the spot.
It has worked for me on my own hunts. That is experience rather than a measurement, though, so I am not going to put a number on it here — that needs measuring against known positions, and when it is done the results will go on huntfix.app whether they flatter the app or not.
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 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. They are deliberately not put in 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? Not from HuntFix. Targets live only on your phone, and deleting the app deletes them. They are included in an iPhone backup if you keep one, but getting one back that way means restoring a whole phone — so export any target you want to keep.
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, accuracy 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.
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? 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. Do not delete the app to fix a problem unless you have exported the targets you want to keep, because there is no backup to restore from.
Reporting a privacy or security concern
Email [email protected]. The app has no server and no account, 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.