Best Piste Map Apps for Skiing in Austria

Do you still need a piste map app if the resort hands out a paper map?

Paper panorama maps are still printed at Austrian lift ticket offices, and they survive a flat battery. What they cannot do is tell you which of the lifts are turning at 14:30 on a windy Thursday. That is the gap the apps fill. The bergfex ski app combines a winter map showing every slope and lift with snow reports, ticket prices and live lift status in one screen.

The second gap is navigation inside large linked areas. The Ski amade app offers A-to-B routing across the ski area plus a Friend Tracker so a split group can regroup without phone calls. In a linked area with dozens of lifts, a routed line from a hut back to the valley station beats a static image saved to your camera roll.

Which piste map apps actually work offline in the Alps?

Mobile coverage in Austrian ski areas is good on ridges and patchy in tree-lined valleys, so offline behaviour matters. The skiresort.info app is explicit about it: you can store favourite resorts and view the piste map out on the mountain without a connection, and you can save a whole country so that every open slope in Austria stays available.

Cold is the second enemy. Skiline sidesteps GPS entirely by reading your ski pass over NFC, which keeps battery drain low and still returns vertical metres, downhill distance and lift rides at the end of the day. If you rely on a GPS tracker instead, keep the phone in an inside pocket, start the recording before the first lift, and accept that continuous tracking plus 3D map rendering will cost you a noticeable slice of charge by lunchtime.

What do these apps cost for the 2026/27 season?

Most of the field is free at the point of use. The Ski amade app is distributed free on iOS and Android, and the skiresort.info app is published as a free ski app covering resorts worldwide. iSKI Austria is likewise free to download from the App Store, where it is published by intermaps.Software GmbH.

The paid tiers buy depth rather than basic maps. Slopes keeps live location tracking, friend finding, key stats and day summaries free, while Interactive Trail Maps and 3D mode require Premium at USD 29.99 per year, with a family plan at USD 49.99 per year and a single day pass at USD 3.99 (checked 15 September 2026). bergfex Pro adds avalanche maps, a slope-steepness layer, six-hourly snow forecast maps and ad-free use; check the current subscription price in the app store listing before you commit.

FATMAP is gone, so what should off-piste skiers use now?

FATMAP was the reference 3D mountain map for freeriders in the Alps. Strava, which had bought it, retired the FATMAP app and website on 1 October 2024 and deleted account data, keeping only selected features inside Strava. Reviewers noted afterwards that the full 3D winter map mode and the user-generated route guidebooks did not survive the move intact.

For Austrian off-piste that leaves two practical routes. Use bergfex Pro for its avalanche map and slope-steepness overlay at the 30, 35, 40 and 45 degree thresholds, which is the layer most skiers want when reading a face from the lift. Or treat the piste map app as resort navigation only and carry a dedicated touring map plus the official avalanche bulletin for anything beyond the marked runs.

What do skiers get wrong when choosing a piste map app?

The first mistake is confusing a tracker with a map. Skiline and Ski Tracks are built to log runs, vertical and speed; neither is designed to route you off a red run in poor visibility. If navigation is the job, start with bergfex, the resort operator app, or Slopes Premium.

The second is installing only one app. Resort operator apps are usually the most accurate on which lifts are spinning, because the data comes from the lift company, while national apps such as iSKI Austria and aggregators such as skiresort.info are better for comparing snow depth across several regions before you drive. Two apps, one offline map cached, covers both jobs.

The third is ignoring language and units. Several Austrian apps default to German and to metres; check the settings on the first evening rather than at the top of a 3,000 metre glacier lift.