Official Freedom Trail® App

Description

Experience more than 250 years of history with the official Freedom Trail® app! Boston’s revolutionary past comes to life with this innovative app, including a self-guided audio tour, interactive map, pictures, and more. The iconic 2.5-mile Freedom Trail connects 16 of America’s most significant historical landmarks, including museums, churches, meeting houses, burying grounds, parks, a ship, and historic markers that tell the story of the American Revolution and beyond. Special Features of this App: - Over 1.5 hours of audio content tells the stories of the Freedom Trail, including music and guest interviews with historians, academics, authors, and others. - The audio for each stop plays automatically thanks to GPS mapping. - An interactive map helps you find your next stop on the Freedom Trail with ease. - Photos and illustrations help direct your eyes and place you within the stories covered. This app is an official product of The Freedom Trail® Foundation. Established in 1964, the Freedom Trail Foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that markets, promotes, and helps to preserve the Freedom Trail through visitor services and programs, educational programs, and marketing and public relations efforts. The Foundation’s Preservation Fund helps support preservation, rehabilitation, and capital projects for official Freedom Trail historic sites; these projects help avoid, minimize, or mitigate adverse effects of the elements and manmade wear and tear of Boston’s precious 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century sites.

Recent Reviews

• ★★★★★Boston Visitor 2026

  Very Good, With Some Room for Improvements

  Overall this app was very good. When you walk the red brick trail the app notifies you of the stop, and the narration tells you about it. It functions well offline. Some possible areas for improvement: (1) Choice of different languages. (2) Option to play narration at 0.75 speed (for those who need more time to understand) or 1.5 speed (for those who want to walk quickly through the stops). (3) Instead of “Remember to look at your app to find your next stop…,” each stop should conclude with “the next stop is X.” (4) Cutting back on some narration; for example, “King's Chapel Burying Ground” seemed lengthy. (5) There are nine stops in Granary Burying Ground (#8-#16) which may contribute to the thronging crowds there. Perhaps some of the material could be moved to stops that do not have crowds (like #35 Crossing the Bridge to Charlestown) to more evenly distribute tourists on the trail. (6) It uses a lot of battery (about 50% over only about 3 hours).

• ★★★★★Dkt01

  Worth the purchase, but...

  I'll start by saying this is absolutely worth the purchase to explore the Boston freedom trail solo or with a partner (using one headphone each was great for us). However, make sure you have plenty of battery or a backup option. My iPhone 15 Pro Max lost over 60% of its charge after completing the full trail. Also, the app will skip to the next stop recording if you wander too far in some places. Still a great resource and we enjoyed the stories and narration for the full trail instead of the condensed version offered in guided tours. Also, note that the app does NOT download the full guide with the app itself. Download the audio guide within the app before your start if you want to save 60MB of mobile data.

• ★★★★★Runner87267728299655489

  Great tour!

  The audio guide was really good - including commentary from a professor of Boston’s history and the late Senator Ted Kennedy. It took a second to learn how to go back and forth between the map and the audio guide, but everything worked great.

• ★★★★★Mooosch

  Well Worth the Purchase!

  My wife and I were visiting Boston for the first time together and wanted to walk the Freedom Trail. Based on what we were looking for, we decided self-guided, preferable audio tour, would be best. We arrived at stop one, the Visitors Center in Boston Commons. When we realized a self-guided tour map was $15, we decided right away to try the app. We shared a pair of AirPods and listened to narration at each stop. The app uses GPS to automatically start the next audio track while walking through the trail. Although I’ll probably never use the app again, the $10 was easily worth it and I’d buy again. Especially to support the official app.

• ★★★★★SstTour

  Keeps reloading and drained down the battery

  The information is good … BUT … Even though I had downloaded the app and the trail/audio, at the end of each stop, the app would say “loading…” with a blank screen. Sometimes it resumed and sometimes I had to kill it and restart. This was very frustrating. It completely drained my battery before the end of the tour.

• ★★★★★predsfan25

  Freedom Trail

  I don’t usually write reviews, but considering the negativity, thought it was worthwhile. I didn’t try the audio feature, but the map was brilliant with nice tidbits about each stop. Well worth the $10 as opposed to an overpriced tour guide you can’t hear. And 40 stops compared to 10 or so with a guide. Stop by Night Shift brewing on the way to Bunker Hill! A pleasant place to rehydrate 😀

• ★★★★★Miss the old school

  not worth wasting your time

  i agree with other reviewers. i flew to boston expressly to walk this trail using the app it’s completely counter intuitive. the UX is terrible. and really?? a litany of edward kennedy quotes? the history of rose kennedy. wow. don’t waste your trip. this app is worthless.

• ★★★★★ccd16

  App drops audio

  The app has a lot of good content and quotes from different people, etc. But - At many sites the audio would stop abruptly at the same spot no matter how many times I tried to play it - the transitions between stops can be a bit glitchy and hard to follow. You had to manually go back and play different segments

• ★★★★★Cal0420

  Tech Support Was Great

  I sent a message to The Freedom Trail App support yesterday at 11:06a, because Stop 27 was not listed on the map. By 1:54p I received a response from Freedom Trail. The message said the technician was going to make an adjustment. Later in the afternoon, I noticed the glitch was fixed. The app will be great to have when I’m in Boston this summer!

• ★★★★★Mr Ben L

  Functionality not so good

  The information here is great, but the app’s functionality still has a ways to go. The GPS sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. It’s very hard to go back-and-forth between the information and the map. Every time you go back to the map, it zooms all the way out, so you have to fiddle with it to see where you are. On a cold day this made it really difficult to navigate. Because the GPS triggering didn’t always work, I ended up reading the information more than I listened to it.