Slopes: Ski & Snowboard

Review by eFreeware

If you ride regularly and like knowing exactly what a day on the hill amounted to, Slopes is built for you. It records your skiing or snowboarding in the background, sorts out the lifts from the descents, and hands back a set of numbers you can compare across a season. The app is free to install and carries a 4.7 average from more than 15,000 ratings.

What appeals to me most is the range of disciplines it covers. You pick your activity from ski, snowboard, monoski, sitski, telemark and others, and the developer says the app then works out the rest on its own, detecting uphill sections, lift rides and runs as the day goes on. For anyone who has fumbled with a stopwatch or a manual tracker at the top of a lift, that hands-off approach is the main draw.

It is also a social app in a narrow, deliberate way. Live location on the recording screen lets a group find each other on the mountain, and you can switch that sharing on or off. Beyond that, there are leaderboards where you and your friends compete across eight different stats over a season, with private accounts so the comparison stays inside your circle.

Riders who get the most from automatic tracking

The clearest fit is the rider who goes out often enough that patterns start to matter: a season pass holder, someone who takes a week in the Alps or a trip to Japan, or a local who wants to know whether this year's vertical is really ahead of last year's. Slopes is designed to accumulate that history, with season and lifetime overviews sitting alongside the day-by-day figures.

It also suits groups. Skiing with family or friends usually involves a lot of standing around wondering where everyone is, and the live location feature addresses that directly. The friendly competitions add a second reason to open the app after the lifts close, since the leaderboards run across a whole season rather than a single afternoon.

Less obvious but worth mentioning: the app is not only for alpine resorts. Recent updates cover uphill and skinning sessions with live ascent figures, a cat ski mode, and lift-versus-hike detection. That makes it more useful to backcountry and sidecountry riders than a simple lift-served tracker would be.

Because the free version covers tracking, key stats, snow conditions and friend finding, the barrier to trying it is low. The premium layer is where the deeper per-run analysis and the interactive maps live, and that is a decision you can make later, once you know whether the basic recording fits how you ride.

Recording that sorts the day out for you

The core of the app is what happens once you press start. You choose your activity, and Slopes handles the rest in the background, splitting the day into uphill travel, lift rides and descents without you marking anything. The developer describes this as smart recording, and the promise is that you can put the phone away and ski.

The recent update refines that engine in ways that matter to people outside the standard resort day. In uphill or skinning mode you get live ascent figures. Cat skiing gets its own mode that separates the ride up from the skiing down. Downhill mode now tells hikes apart from lifts and gives each its own totals. There is also work on reducing false runs created by short uphill segments in the middle of a descent, and on trimming lift lines and waiting time from the start and end of runs so the numbers reflect actual skiing.

All of this feeds into the statistics. Speed, vertical, run times and similar measures are presented per day and can be compared season over season, which is the part that turns a tracker into something you keep using. If you have ever wanted to know whether your best run of last February still holds up, that comparison is the point.

Maps, conditions and knowing where you are

Resort information is a big part of the package. Slopes covers thousands of resorts worldwide, and the interactive trail maps, available for more than 2,000 resorts across the US, Canada, the European Alps, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, are a premium feature. They come in 2D or 3D and show where you and your friends are on the mountain and where to go next. On many North American resorts the maps also include on-mountain facilities such as restrooms, which is the kind of detail that matters more than it sounds when you are halfway up.

The named North American resorts include Vail, Breckenridge, Mammoth Mountain, Steamboat, Killington, Stowe, Whistler, Winter Park, Keystone, Snowbasin, Telluride, Deer Valley, Okemo, Palisades Tahoe, Arapahoe, Big Sky, Whitefish and Mount Tremblant, among others. The maps sit alongside resort details like elevation, trail difficulty breakdown, and a typical day's mix of lift time and downhill time.

Premium also adds live lift and trail status at selected resorts, estimated stats for each run in real time, and a full timeline of your day where you can see where your top speeds happened and which run was your best, with speed heatmaps layered onto the winter maps. Runs can be compared with friends or with your own past outings.

One premium detail I would single out is offline access. With a premium subscription you can save any of the resort trail maps in the app for use without cell reception, which is the sort of thing that only becomes important when you are on a mountain with no signal and no idea where the next lift is.

What the free download includes

Slopes is free to install, and the free version shows no ads. There are no ads. What you get without paying includes unlimited tracking, the core statistics and summaries, snow conditions, season and lifetime overviews, Health Connect support, and the friend-finding features.

The app does offer in-app purchases, which is how the premium tier is sold. Premium is where the interactive trail maps, live lift and trail status, per-run estimated stats, the full timeline with speed heatmaps, run comparisons, fitness insights and offline map saving sit. Free users still get the tracking and the headline numbers; the paid tier is aimed at riders who want the day broken down run by run and the maps in their pocket.

The choice is not between watching ads and paying. It is between a capable free tracker and a richer paid one, and the free tier is complete enough to judge whether the recording style suits you before committing.

How it compares with the alternatives

The obvious alternatives fall into a few groups. General fitness and activity trackers will log a day on the hill, but they are not built around lifts, runs and vertical in the way Slopes is, and they rarely offer resort maps or trail difficulty data. A dedicated GPS watch and its companion software is another route, though the mapping and social layers tend to be thinner.

Resort-specific apps are a third option, usually strong on the mountain they cover and limited outside it. Slopes takes the opposite approach, covering thousands of resorts with a consistent set of tools, which is more useful if you travel between mountains rather than sticking to one.

For anyone already using a general health platform, Slopes fits alongside it rather than replacing it. The skiing data can sit next to the rest of your activity history. The privacy stance is also worth weighing against alternatives: the developer states that your data is never sold, accounts are optional, and Google sign-in is supported if you do create one.

A tracker worth carrying for a full season

Slopes has been on Google Play since January 2021 and was updated in September 2026, with more than half a million installs and a 4.7 average from over 15,000 ratings. Those numbers suggest a mature, well-liked tracker rather than a new experiment, and the recent recording improvements show the developer is still refining the parts that matter to serious riders.

My recommendation is straightforward. If you ski or snowboard more than a handful of days a season and want an automatic record of what you did, the free version is an easy install: it tracks without ads, covers the main stats and lets you find your friends on the hill. If you also want the interactive maps, per-run breakdowns, the day's timeline and offline map saving, the premium tier is where those live, and the free tier gives you a fair basis for deciding whether to pay.

It is best suited to riders who value data and travel across different resorts, and to groups who want to keep track of each other and compete over a season. The app is built around recording and analyzing time on snow, and that focus is exactly what makes it useful to the people it is meant for.

What's new in version 2026.16

**Improved** - Big recording engine upgrades that take Slopes beyond lifts & runs: (1) live ascent stats when you start in uphill/skinning mode; (2) a new cat ski mode tuned to tell cat rides from skiing for backcountry; (3) in downhill mode, hikes are detected separately from lifts, with live stats and their own totals; (4) fewer "phantom runs" from short uphill segments mid-run; (5) smarter trimming of lift lines and waiting time at the start/end of runs.