Most Zwifters understand how Zwift’s guest world system functions: we can ride Watopia all the time, as well as one “guest map” which rotates on a calendar basis. You make these choices on the start screen:
There are times when a rider may want to access a different guest map than the currently-scheduled one: perhaps they want to ride alone, or tick off a particular route completion badge. This can be done easily on a PC or Mac setup using the world tag hack or ZwiftHack’s “Zwift Preferences” tool, but doing the world tag hack on iOS is a hassle.
So how do you world hack on an iOS (Apple) or Android device?
Easy: use the old school date hack! (We call it “old school” because this is how Zwifters used to world hack before the world tag hack was discovered.)
The Big Idea
Here’s the big idea: we already know what the course calendar has scheduled for the current month. If you want to ride in an off-calendar world, just find a date in the past when that world was scheduled, and set your device to that date before starting up Zwift.
Making It Happen
Here’s the simple process to date hack in iOS (Android is very similar):
- Change the date: go to Settings>General>Date & Time, turn off the “Set Automatically” option, and manually choose the date for the guest world you’re wanting to ride/run.
- Start up Zwift, go through the pairing screen, and select the desired guest world route.
- Go back to your device’s date setting and change it back to Set Automatically.
- Click to begin your Zwift session.
If you follow these steps, your ride will be saved (and uploaded to Strava, if desired) with today’s current date intact. Perfect!
If you forget to change the date back to today’s date, or you wait until you’ve begun your activity to change the date back to today’s date, it will upload to Strava using the old “hacked” date, but save to Zwift using today’s date.
What About AppleTV?
Unfortunately, AppleTV only lets you manually set your time zone, not the date. The best you can do is use the time zone setting to go back or forward several hours and get access to a recently-scheduled guest map.
Give it a Try!
If you’re looking to world hack on iOS, we hope you give this a try and let us know how it goes.
Be warned hacking the date on iOS can have a bunch of subtile side effects and even lock your Apple ID out of some services. My kids used to do that to help with some games and it was often messing their devices, which I had the trouble to fix after. I personally would not do it.
In my experience, just changing it for the minute or so it takes to start up Zwift and pick a route doesn’t seem to affect anything.
But yeah: do it at your own risk, I suppose!
FWIW if one simply wants to ride alone they can do so by turning off the wifi connection after the course is loaded. Of course, you’d want to turn it back on at the end of the session if you want to save it. I’m sure this has already been talked about, but figured I’d mention it here in case others didn’t know. I use the trick when I’m Zwifting somewhere that doesn’t have a WIFI connection, which occurs fairly often. I use my phone as a hotspot for my laptop, load my course of choice, and then turn the… Read more »
I selected 10 November 2019 as the date in my Settings in order to get the Innsbruck course, but when I then loaded Zwift it still showed London (today’s course), so this hack didn’t work for me, despite having followed the instructions to the letter.
You may need to choose a date from the current month–not sure Zwift saves past month’s calendars.
Yay, that worked. This is going to be great – thanks!
In MacOS Catalina, there’s an easier way that’s more analogous to the MacOS/PC world hack: In the sync/backup screen for your iOS device on your computer (like if you were going to add files to a program during a sync), if you click the Files tab, you can download the files from Zwift onto your computer as a single folder under the Zwift app. On your computer, you can then use the same text edit hack of adding the World tag in the file, save it, and put it back on your iOS device (the entire folder again). You need… Read more »
Thanks for this one ! I tested the hack on ios and it works perfectly. Was super wierd riding in a ghost town. Cool to know about the WIFI hack 🙂 that being the said when you download the .fit file from Zwift the filename itself still has the old date but the date/time within the .fit file is the current date. Golden Cheetah as an example correctly loaded the file.
I think it’s stopped working since Aug 2022 update. Now says it can’t connect to servers