Slope Minder
For iPhone, iPhone Duo, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro
Slope Minder
The mountain, drawn beautifully. Your people, on it.
Free until the opening-day update in late November. Then hosting a group is a subscription, $59.99 a year, and everyone in your group rides free. Install before then and your first week is on us.
A ski app for the people you ski with.
Slope Minder is a painted map of the mountain for planning the trip, and a way for a family or a group of friends to keep track of each other once they are on it. It shows where everyone is, and it knows what each of them is doing without anyone typing a thing.
Sam is on Liberty Bowl. Dad is in line at Ramcharger 8. Maya said wait for me.
The map
Each resort painted from lidar and aerial imagery, the way a good trail map is drawn. Turn it, tilt it, and look down a run before you drop in. Send a run to a friend and it opens on their map. No account needed.
The group
Start a group for the day or the week. Everyone in it is on the map with what they're doing (on a run, riding a lift, in the lift line, stopped) and what they've said. If someone says they're hurt, everyone knows at once.
Drawn, not photographed.
Every resort starts from government lidar and aerial imagery, sorted into snow, trees, rock, and buildings, and repainted in one palette: timber green, snow and its shade, runs in their colours, lifts in red with their towers. It looks like the trail map on the wall of the lodge. Unlike that one, you can turn it.
Tap a run for its grade, length, vertical, steepest pitch, and which way it faces. Tap a lift for its rise, ride time, and seats. Search finds lifts, runs, food, and services. Runs wear the colours of their own country, so a red in the Alps is red, and lengths come in feet or metres to match your phone.
Found the run for tomorrow? Send it. With the app, the link opens on that run on your friend's map.
Thousands of resorts
From the big names of North America, the Alps, and Japan to the local hill, and as far south as New Zealand and Chile. Search for any of them in any language. Each one downloads when you pick it and keeps itself up to date.
Where everyone is, and what they're doing.
Start a group for the day or the week and send the link, or hold up the QR code. Everyone who joins is on the map.
Each phone is matched against the resort's lifts and runs, so the app knows the difference between riding a lift, standing in its line, skiing, and stopped. That's one badge on each person. The other is what they've said, and it clears itself, so nobody is reading a stale "heading for food" at four o'clock.
Nobody takes their gloves off on a chairlift to type, so all of it works by voice: "Hey Siri, tell Slope Minder I'm heading to lunch." With headphones in, the app speaks up when it matters (Maya wants you to wait, Alex is heading for your lift), and only into the headphones, never out of a pocket. The lock screen and the Dynamic Island carry everyone's badges too.
If someone has been stopped on a run for a while and hasn't said they're taking a break, the group gets a nudge. Where a phone usually loses signal, their card says so, so an old position doesn't read like a worrying one.
If someone is hurt
Hurt is different from every other status. Say it, by tap or by voice, and it asks you to confirm. Then the whole group is told at once, and your screen turns into what you need next: the resort's own ski patrol number, the country's emergency number, where you are in the form patrol and a dispatcher ask for, and who in your group is closest.
On your wrist
Tap Ski on your Apple Watch and the day records as a workout, with your heart rate, and keeps your position on the phone accurate. The group's badges come to the watch face in the Smart Stack.
Epic on the Duo.
Open, iPhone Duo is almost two phones side by side, and the map gets all of it, edge to edge, with the details in a card in the corner. Closed, it's a short, wide phone with the controls down the side. Fold it mid-run and nothing is lost: same resort, same run, same view.
Every Duo picture here is from Apple's simulator.
Private by design.
You're visible only to the people in a group you're sharing with, only while you share, and every group ends on its own, after an hour or up to two weeks.
Positions are end-to-end encrypted between the group's phones, so we can't read them, and they're never stored. There is no history of where anyone has been. Browsing and skiing solo need no account at all, and a group needs only Sign in with Apple. The privacy policy says exactly what leaves your phone.
See the mountain before you get there.
The drawing is the reason to open it in October. Fly around a resort you've never skied, find the bowl everyone talks about, see how far the condo is from the lift, and pick a run for each person in the group before anyone has bought a ticket.
On Apple Vision Pro the mountain sits on your coffee table. Walk around it, pinch it anywhere from a foot across to ten feet, and tap a lift or a run for its facts. After the trip, replay a day you recorded and watch your own line come down the mountain.
