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The 3 Best Deer Hunting Apps for 2018

Sam Ubl

These days it’s rare to meet a person who doesn’t own a smartphone, and the demand for app developers is creating a wave for the future of our youth. The app market is surging, a continuous climb that began little more than a decade ago. To survive, smartphone apps have to showcase usefulness beyond their entertainment features to stand a fighting chance in one of the most competitive product markets on the planet. This article ranks the authors Top 3 hunting themed apps in 2018, each representing a different niche/purpose to maintain uniqueness.

1. onX Hunt – Best Mapping App

The onX Hunt app has far and wide become a must-have app on any serious outdoorsman’s smartphone. Using aerial imagery, this mapping tool allows the user to determine property owners of individual parcels at a single glance. The end-user can click on any parcel to learn more details behind the piece, such as acreage, coordinates, the Unit and Sub-Unit, the owners full name and their registered mailing address.

If you’re a hunter, you need this app. This tools features and functionality is unparalleled – especially since it integrates between your mobile device, GPS, and desktop seamlessly.

End-users have a variety of map layering tools to work with, too. Possibly one of the neatest and most useful map layers to use is the topo feature. By implementing the topo layer on the aerial map, an end-user can make better sense of the lay of the land they are viewing, which helps towards scouting and navigation.

OnX maps are updated with the most relevant public and private land parcel data at least once a year per state. That means parcel ownership data is current to within a year. In some cases where extremely rural areas have not updated ownership plat data in several years, the data may either be non-existent, or outdated on the source onX pulls it’s information from.

Perhaps one of the most useful features I’ve come to really depend on is the “Off-Grid Map”, which I can use by turning my phone into a handheld GPS unit. The onX app allows you to download sections of the maps and save them to your phone for use outside of cell networks. This feature is exceptional, especially when you find yourself hunting bluffs and mountains when cell reception is spotty at best. Going “Off-Grid” also saves your battery a ton and allows you to use your phone in airplane mode while still showing your exact location.

Visit onX online: https://www.onxmaps.com/

App Fee: Premium $29.99/annual; Elite Yearly $99.99; Elite Monthly $14.99

Availability: Apple App Store, Google Play


2. Quiver Hunting App – Best Journal App

The Quiver Hunting App is a universal tool that not only allows you to monitor key weather data, but it also outputs sunrise/sunset times, moon phases, and barometric pressure percentages based on your location when the app is in use. In addition to the conditional monitoring, Quiver Hunting App also serves as a personal hunt journal, date and time stamping each of your journal entries and image uploads whenever you post them.

A few taps of the finger is all you need to track crucial information during every hunt. Quiver makes recording a hunting journal easy.

As a writer, one of my favorite means of staying active with my writing includes journal keeping after every hunt to one day serve as a timeline I can refer to each season after the next to remind myself when I experienced the hottest activity. Included with the journal timeline history are related key weather conditions pertinent to your location during those times you recorded the entries. This is huge in understanding how certain winds affected your hunts, and/or how certain environmental conditions may have hindered, or amplified deer activity.

The app is set-up to keep your journal entries private to just you, however, it also has a social feature that makes it easy to publicly share photos from the field with captions.

Visit Huntmore online: https://quiverapp.co/

App Fee: FREE

Availability: Apple App Store


3. Huntmore by Fieldguide – Best Lifestyle App

Every season is a journey, where lessons are learned the hard way. At the end of every outdoor adventure a story comes along with it. Some people are gifted story-tellers, while others have a way with words by putting pen to paper, but a good photo has a way of telling a story without the words.

Huntmore is a free state of the art online platform created for hunters to share their observations and successes in the field, scouting discoveries, trail camera images, antler sheds and deadhead finds, wild game recipes, apparel, hunting product reviews & testimonials, wildlife art, and more with minimal data entry required thanks to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) component behind the toolset.

Huntmore is a leader in homegrown Artificial Intelligence (AI) cataloging, which is leading the way in a world of simplifying tools for user-friendliness. In other words, the less button pressing, the better, and Huntmore understands that. The entire app is built upon a category hierarchy starting with high-level Parent categories, such as “Hunting Supplies,” “Scouting & Tracking,” “Taxidermy,” “Hunts,” etc. The end-user can choose to upload a photo and add it under a pertinent recommended category, or simply use the app to reference material under the specific subject matter the end-user is interested in seeing images of, such as “Buck Beds,” “ATL Antler Sheds & Deadheads,” or “Track Identification.”

Imagine walking in the woods and coming across an unusual animal track. Simply take an image while using the app and see if the AI component recognizes characteristics of that track and recommends a possible description of what it could be from – this is the power of AI on the Huntmore app, it literally grows its intelligence as new images are uploaded and categorized.

Other neat features of the Huntmore app include end-user ability to include hyperlinks with their posts. Several popular hunting podcaster companies, like Working Class Bowhunter, and Deer Hunter Podcast, publish links with episode cover art to make it easy for their followers to listen to the podcast with one easy button.

Follow individual members, and even certain categories that mean the most to you, like traditional archery equipment, or deer camp photos, and easily view the latest from each of those Following Streams you’ve created for yourself.

Visit Huntmore online: http://www.huntmore.io

App Fee: FREE

Availability: Apple App Store, Google Play

About The Author
Using a canoe to deer hunt unpressured areas | Big buck in a canoe

Sam Ubl

Sam Ubl is a Wisconsin native with a passion for outdoor writing, videography, and film production. He balances a 50/50 trade-off between time on the water and spent in the deer woods. If he’s not casting for musky in the summer, he’s off chasing giant whitetails in the places most aren’t willing to go. Sam is a freelance writer for a long list of print and online media publications and is a co-founder of the Huntmore App and Fishmore App. Sam is also the owner and co-founder of Chase Nation, the reality hunting YouTube and CarbonTV film series, along with his partner, Brad Werwinski. Check out the Chase Nation web page here and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.


  Fisherman with a big musky in Wisconsin

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