Ordnance Survey Explorer Mobile Maps
Have you ever wished you could get your Ordnance Survey Explorer maps on your phone? Well, now you can. Ordnance Survey re-released their Explorer series of maps with a free mobile download included in the purchase.
How does it work?
It's simple — download the Ordnance Survey OS Maps app on your phone. When you buy a map marked "Now includes Mobile Download" on the cover, there's a unique code inside the map (hidden with silver like a scratch card). Type the code into the app and you can download that map to your phone.
What can you do with the app?
Obviously one of the most helpful functions of a map on your phone is that you can be sure of where you are. The app shows your current location, lets you plan and save a route for later, and search for places by name. The maps are saved to your phone, so you don't need to worry about not having a mobile signal.
Which maps can I buy?
Ordnance Survey soft-launched these new maps by releasing Britain's National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty first, with the wider Explorer range and Landranger maps following after.
At the time, this is what OS offered
This was a smart move by Ordnance Survey back in 2016. Rather than asking walkers to choose between a paper map and a digital one, they made the paper purchase double up as a digital one too — you got the physical Explorer map you'd have bought anyway, plus a code to unlock the same coverage on your phone at no extra cost. For anyone who liked the reassurance of paper but also wanted GPS positioning on the move, it was a genuinely useful bridge between the two, and a sensible way for OS to nudge existing paper-map customers into their digital ecosystem without forcing a separate purchase.
It also meant the digital map you downloaded was exactly the same product as the paper one in your bag — same edition, same coverage area — which avoided any confusion about whether the app's mapping matched what you were holding.
Where this fits into OS's digital offering today
Since then, Ordnance Survey has continued to consolidate its digital tools into the OS Maps app, which is now the single home for route planning, offline downloads and live location, whether or not you've bought a paper map with a bundled code. The core idea from this 2016 scheme — pairing a physical map with an offline digital copy — is still very much how OS Maps works today, just without needing a scratch-card code tied to a specific printed edition; digital map coverage is now available through app subscriptions and individual purchases in their own right.
Don't forget the map
It may be very handy to have an OS map on your phone, but at ProCamping we never travel without a physical paper map too — you just don't know when your phone is going to run out of battery.