There are three different things that all get called "the route", and it is worth separating them before talking about exporting any of them.
- The recording, the GPX you brought in. Where you went, once, some time ago.
- The computed route, what the app built by matching that recording to the road network. Same shape, but made of roads, with names and turn instructions attached, and with a few stretches where it gave up and kept your line instead.
- The drive, what happened today. It is neither of the other two, because today you missed a turn near Bande, stopped for forty minutes, and took the left at Ortho that you meant to take last time and did not.
The third one is the only one that is new information, and it is the one you can export.
What comes out
At the end of a drive, Roadbook '71 will write the drive you actually made as a new GPX file: the positions your phone recorded while following the roadbook, in order, with their timestamps. It goes wherever you send it (Files, AirDrop, mail, straight into another app) and it is a plain GPX with nothing proprietary in it.
It is a recording, in other words. Exactly the same kind of thing you fed in at the start, and usable in exactly the same way: it can be imported straight back into the app as the basis for the next roadbook.
Why you would want it
To improve the loop
This is the main one, and it is a genuinely good loop to be in. Drive the route, notice the two places where the original recording was wrong (a junction where you now know the left is better, a village you would rather skirt), take those turns as you drive, export the result, and use that file next time. Three iterations and the roadbook describes the drive you actually want, rather than the one you happened to take the first time.
The app has no route editor beyond pinning waypoints, and this is why it does not need one. Editing a line by dragging it on a small screen is unpleasant and imprecise. Driving the correction is precise by definition.
To see where you actually went
Open the planned route and the driven route in the same viewer and the differences stand out immediately. Wrong turns and their recoveries show as small loops hanging off the line. Where you stopped shows as a dense knot of points in one place. And the stretches where the route fell back to the raw recording, the ones where guidance went quiet, are where the two lines were identical to start with, so any divergence there is entirely you.
This is more interesting than it sounds after a long drive. A loop you thought you knew turns out to have three places where you consistently go a slightly different way from the file.
To share the drive rather than the plan
If someone asks for the route, the driven file is the honest thing to send. It has the actual road you took at every junction, including the improvised bits, and the timestamps say how long it really took rather than what a router estimated.
To keep it
A GPX is about as durable as a file format gets: plain XML, twenty-plus years old, readable by everything. A drive exported as GPX will still open in whatever exists in fifteen years, which is not true of an entry in some app's database, including this one's.
What the file does and does not contain
It is positions and times. That means:
- It has no instructions in it. Turn-by-turn is generated from the road network at route-building time, not stored in the track. Reimport the exported file and the app will build instructions for it again, from scratch, which is correct, because road data changes.
- It has your stops in it. Forty minutes parked outside a café is forty minutes of near-identical points. Harmless, and useful if you want to know where you stopped, but it does mean a driven file is a little larger and a little lumpier than a clean recording.
- It has your mistakes in it. The wrong turn and the way back are both in there. If you are going to reuse the file as a roadbook, it is worth trimming those in any GPX editor first, or next time the book will faithfully instruct you to make the same mistake.
That last point is the one that catches people. The app takes the recording as the truth, and a recording of you getting lost is a truthful record of you getting lost.
Where the file goes
Nowhere, unless you send it. There is no account, no sync and no server on our side; the export is a file handed to iOS's share sheet, and what happens next is entirely your decision. Deleting the app deletes everything it was holding, exports included.
A small habit worth adopting
Export at the end of every drive, even the ones that went perfectly, and keep them in a folder with the date in the filename. They cost a few hundred kilobytes each.
Two summers of those is a surprisingly good record of what you did, better than photographs at reminding you of a specific afternoon, because it has the roads and the weather is implied by the times. And the good ones become next year's roadbooks without any further work.