I’ve been using Waze for the past year but I just looked it up and realised that it’s also owned by Google. I tried using OsmAnd yesterday twice, but the first time I went through a tunnel it just stopped giving directions when I came out of the tunnel (a bug I assume). The second time on the way home, it took me down the wrong exit and I almost ended up at the airport!
Anybody have a better experience with other apps? I’ve just installed Organic Maps so I’ll see how that goes this week.
For most people Organic Maps is the move.
I love OSMand and it has become my digital pin board of places I’ve been to over the years. It can do a lot (for example I have a preset with sat imagery and a transparent topo map overlay for hiking) but it can be clunky, and a lot of cool stuff is hard to find and change in the menus.
I love OSMand. It does exactly what a map should do. It doesn’t have these weird user unfriendly quirks that Here and Google Maps have that make them harder to use.
I just have one problem with it, it gives some directions via notifications instead of voice, for some reason, which is baaaad when you’re driving.
GPS (and cellular) doesn’t work in tunnels, and it takes a number of seconds for it to reconnect and get GPS coordinates again once you come out of the tunnel.
This is true for all GPS apps and services.
That is true, but it did regain my GPS coordinates and continued to track my location, but the navigation instructions telling me where to turn etc. disappeared and never came back. Luckily I wasn’t alone in the car so they just took over navigation for me
And it still might take a minute or two for your cellular to reconnect to gather further directions.
Some apps just might be better about the cellular reconnect side than others, I haven’t tried them all.
Even then, it can take over a minute to reconnect to some cellular networks after a tunnel blackout, which may exceed the timeout of some mapping app data requests.
There isn’t really a reason for the app not to fake your journey through the tunnel. It knows you’re about to enter a tunnel, and it knows you will probably lose GPS signal. It should just show you driving through that tunnel until an estimated time you should exit, then if you don’t reconnect in time it should pause at that spot until you catch up.
The commercial options guess where you are in the tunnel based on crowdsource speed outside of the tunnel in both directions. When you come out of the tunnel you don’t have GPS service but they will continue to guess until they reconnect which is a rather nice feature.
I have had organic maps freak out coming out of a tunnel and just never reconnect.
i have been using magic earth with no issues.
Organic maps is nicer gui and directions, i’m trying to use it more.