GPS Stakeout  ·  Docs
Using the App

On-Device & Private by Design

GPS Stakeout does its work on your iPhone. The intelligent part that ships today is on-device text recognition for the deed scanner, built on Apple's Vision framework — and everything you enter stays on your device.

Why it matters: Property boundaries are sensitive, and field work often happens where there's no signal. Doing the work on-device keeps it both private and available offline.

On-device text recognition

The Scan Deed Document feature uses Apple's Vision framework to read a printed or neatly handwritten deed with your camera — entirely on the device. It reconstructs two-column "bearing / distance" layouts into proper rows before handing the text to the parser, so a clean page usually comes in with little or no cleanup.

No internet required

All image recognition runs on your iPhone. Nothing is uploaded, and it works in the field with no signal. See Camera / OCR Scan for how to use it.

Review before you save

Scanned text is shown as parsed legs, each with the exact source text it came from, plus warnings for anything uncertain — so you confirm the read rather than trust it blindly.

Private by design

Your plats — boundary descriptions, corner coordinates, and folder names — are stored only on your device using Apple's SwiftData. Location is used in real time to navigate and is never transmitted. There is no account, no tracking, and no ads.

The one network call, minimized

The optional PLSS Section lookup queries the public BLM map service with township, range, and section numbers only — no personal information. Map tiles load from Apple Maps. Everything else runs offline.

Works offline

Parsing deed text, scanning a document, anchoring a plat, navigating to corners, and VR boundary mode all work with no connection. Only PLSS lookup and map tiles need internet.

Device requirements

GPS Stakeout runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS or iPadOS 17 or later. The camera is used for deed scanning and VR mode. A Bluetooth GPS receiver is optional and improves accuracy — see External GPS.

On the roadmap: we only document features once they actually ship. As Apple's on-device frameworks mature, we'll look at deeper integrations — and we'll write about them here when they're in the app, not before.