I too have an iPad. Indeed, free nav apps for iOS are fewer. Thanks for the tip on Aponia Be On Road, I'll give it a try.
Navfree USA exists on iOS.
Navfree USA exists on iOS.
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My test of freeware Android offline GPS navigation applications
- Thread starter RockSockDoc
- Start date
Interesting review but last summer I tried (and reviewed) 3 of those free offline navigation apps, NavFree (USA), OsmAnd, & Mapfactor:Navigator (all based on the Open Street Maps database) and I found Navfree to be the best because I valued some things not covered in the OP's post.
1) Only NavFree allows you to navigate to a contact in your address book!!! That's critical for me. The OP complains about creating "Favorites" in NavFree. For me, my address book contains my favorites. I don't want to type in addresses on my phone every time I go somewhere. That's torture. (And I found it easiest to add "Favorites" anyway.)
2) Only Navfree consistently let me enter a house number for a destination, like "123 Main Street". The others made you rough-out blocks or pick cross-streets. C'mon. That ain't door-to-door navigation. So lame.
3) Only NavFree had an intuitive user-interface. No instructions needed. Very simple. With the others, I struggled to figure out how to set destinations, & favorites, or find points of interest, get a direction list, etc.
4) NavFree had the easiest map downloading. You just hit the "Upgrade" button and then select which state you want to download. If the download gets interrupted or if you pause it, then you can resume from where you left off (unlike the others). It's 2.6GB for the entire US (or about 50MB/state on average). A big state like CA is ~200MB. A small state like RI is ~5GB. It was like torture downloading MapFactor:Navigator maps. The user interface was not intuitive, the downloads would fail several times, and then not resume from where they left off so I'd have to start all over. OsmAnd was OK in this regard but was limited to 8 maps in the free version.
5) Navfree and OsmAnd both had nice, clear, bright, attractive maps and interfaces. Navigator did not.
NavFree can be kinda laggy and it doesn't have anywhere near the polish of Google Navigation, but for a free backup navigation app, it's pretty darned good, and IMHO, way better than the other two, which I found frustratingly difficult to use.
1) Only NavFree allows you to navigate to a contact in your address book!!! That's critical for me. The OP complains about creating "Favorites" in NavFree. For me, my address book contains my favorites. I don't want to type in addresses on my phone every time I go somewhere. That's torture. (And I found it easiest to add "Favorites" anyway.)
2) Only Navfree consistently let me enter a house number for a destination, like "123 Main Street". The others made you rough-out blocks or pick cross-streets. C'mon. That ain't door-to-door navigation. So lame.
3) Only NavFree had an intuitive user-interface. No instructions needed. Very simple. With the others, I struggled to figure out how to set destinations, & favorites, or find points of interest, get a direction list, etc.
4) NavFree had the easiest map downloading. You just hit the "Upgrade" button and then select which state you want to download. If the download gets interrupted or if you pause it, then you can resume from where you left off (unlike the others). It's 2.6GB for the entire US (or about 50MB/state on average). A big state like CA is ~200MB. A small state like RI is ~5GB. It was like torture downloading MapFactor:Navigator maps. The user interface was not intuitive, the downloads would fail several times, and then not resume from where they left off so I'd have to start all over. OsmAnd was OK in this regard but was limited to 8 maps in the free version.
5) Navfree and OsmAnd both had nice, clear, bright, attractive maps and interfaces. Navigator did not.
NavFree can be kinda laggy and it doesn't have anywhere near the polish of Google Navigation, but for a free backup navigation app, it's pretty darned good, and IMHO, way better than the other two, which I found frustratingly difficult to use.
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I agree with RazzMaTazz, NavFree is the best of the ones I tried (Be-On-Road, Navigator Free, OsmAnd). The OP here seems obsessed with Favourites, which is fine if that is what is most important to them, but that is not what I care most about, and for my purposes I almost reverse the suggested ordering. What made or broke these apps for me:
NavFree: easily the best address search. You can enter a street name without a city and it finds all matches from which you just select the one you want, which puts it way ahead of the rest right there (see Be-On-Road comments for a good reason why). The navigation GUI is clean and attractive, easy to read, and menus are obvious and easy to use. Routing and re-routing are fast and accurate. Spoken instructions are clear and less prone to confusing extraneous instructions than other apps. Route planning is easy, as is downloading maps/voices. Downsides are no TTS (but nice voices), and if you accidentally hit the "exit" button it happily does so without any confirmation, leaving you without navigation!
Be-On-Road: search requires a city first, which is useless in rural areas where the city is not obvious or the unincorporated town is not considered a city in the search index. Once you get it sorted out, routing is quick and accurate, with very fast re-routing if you stray. Route planning and map downloading were easy. No TTS, and I don't especially care for the voice it uses, but it works. The navigation GUI is not very nice, with small and cluttered info across the bottom that makes it hard to see at a glance what it is trying to tell me. It also has 3D buildings, which is kind of gimmicky, but none of the others did that, so I mention it here for completeness.
Navigator Free: most of the same comments from Be-On-Road apply, EXCEPT it has much slower and less accurate routing/re-routing, and voice is even worse (it sounds bored or something). POI icons are so small they might as well not be there. Also, map downloading was a nightmare, often failing most of the way through, and although it claimed to resume downloads, it often required an app restart, which seemed to make it just start all over again.
OsmAnd: unusable for navigation. Seriously. Unintuitive interface makes it hard to find/perform basic functions. Address searching is poor, and it is unable to find addresses easily found by other apps. Routing is slow and limited to ~200km, and makes strange choices that diverge from the best route for no obvious reason, resulting in much longer and slower trips than necessary. Re-routing is unworkably slow (you might find your own way back to the route before it does), and route planning is far from easy. TTS is great for street names, although the robotic voice sometimes makes other instructions unintelligible. Worse, it would give extraneous "turn slightly right" instructions at any right-hand bend in a continuous road where there was a minor road or exit on the left, which was just confusing and unnecessary, especially since it says the same thing for highway entry/exit (which is not ideal anyway), so you were never sure what was going on. Map downloading was OK, but you are limited to 10 in the free version; note that some single maps in other apps are here split into sub-areas (e.g., Canada), so this limit is more strict than you might think. On the plus side, I did like the navigation GUI, it was attractive and easy to read (although only 2D view is available), but without functional search and navigation, what use is that?
So I have NavFree as my primary, and Be-On-Road as a backup. Navigator did not offer me anything Be-On-Road could not do as well or better, and OsmAnd was just a waste of space and time.
That said, OsmAnd is one I would go back to if they fixed the terrible routing engine (plenty of complaints on the web about this). I would eventually get used to the quirky interface - although they could fix that too! - and it just looks good, TTS is worth having, and it has some other nice mapping features and plugin support.
NavFree: easily the best address search. You can enter a street name without a city and it finds all matches from which you just select the one you want, which puts it way ahead of the rest right there (see Be-On-Road comments for a good reason why). The navigation GUI is clean and attractive, easy to read, and menus are obvious and easy to use. Routing and re-routing are fast and accurate. Spoken instructions are clear and less prone to confusing extraneous instructions than other apps. Route planning is easy, as is downloading maps/voices. Downsides are no TTS (but nice voices), and if you accidentally hit the "exit" button it happily does so without any confirmation, leaving you without navigation!
Be-On-Road: search requires a city first, which is useless in rural areas where the city is not obvious or the unincorporated town is not considered a city in the search index. Once you get it sorted out, routing is quick and accurate, with very fast re-routing if you stray. Route planning and map downloading were easy. No TTS, and I don't especially care for the voice it uses, but it works. The navigation GUI is not very nice, with small and cluttered info across the bottom that makes it hard to see at a glance what it is trying to tell me. It also has 3D buildings, which is kind of gimmicky, but none of the others did that, so I mention it here for completeness.
Navigator Free: most of the same comments from Be-On-Road apply, EXCEPT it has much slower and less accurate routing/re-routing, and voice is even worse (it sounds bored or something). POI icons are so small they might as well not be there. Also, map downloading was a nightmare, often failing most of the way through, and although it claimed to resume downloads, it often required an app restart, which seemed to make it just start all over again.
OsmAnd: unusable for navigation. Seriously. Unintuitive interface makes it hard to find/perform basic functions. Address searching is poor, and it is unable to find addresses easily found by other apps. Routing is slow and limited to ~200km, and makes strange choices that diverge from the best route for no obvious reason, resulting in much longer and slower trips than necessary. Re-routing is unworkably slow (you might find your own way back to the route before it does), and route planning is far from easy. TTS is great for street names, although the robotic voice sometimes makes other instructions unintelligible. Worse, it would give extraneous "turn slightly right" instructions at any right-hand bend in a continuous road where there was a minor road or exit on the left, which was just confusing and unnecessary, especially since it says the same thing for highway entry/exit (which is not ideal anyway), so you were never sure what was going on. Map downloading was OK, but you are limited to 10 in the free version; note that some single maps in other apps are here split into sub-areas (e.g., Canada), so this limit is more strict than you might think. On the plus side, I did like the navigation GUI, it was attractive and easy to read (although only 2D view is available), but without functional search and navigation, what use is that?
So I have NavFree as my primary, and Be-On-Road as a backup. Navigator did not offer me anything Be-On-Road could not do as well or better, and OsmAnd was just a waste of space and time.
That said, OsmAnd is one I would go back to if they fixed the terrible routing engine (plenty of complaints on the web about this). I would eventually get used to the quirky interface - although they could fix that too! - and it just looks good, TTS is worth having, and it has some other nice mapping features and plugin support.
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Here it is, a month later, and I have to take back some of the harsh words I had for osmand. But not all of them.
I just got a newer phone, and for whatever reason osmand works better now, in ways that are not just speed-related. Was there some other update? I did not keep track of versions, so I don't know. Anyway, the extraneous navigation commands are gone, which is great!
Routing/re-routing are much faster, but that could just be the more powerful phone; perhaps osmand is not a great idea on older hardware (although my old 1GHz mono-core was fine for everything else). It still has the 200km limit, though.
Another plus is that I just got a map update, and changes I recently made to OSM for my town are already in there! None of the others have caught up so fast.
However, search is still poor, requiring a lot of guesswork to find addresses (entering neighbouring towns when the town it should be under is not listed, etc.).
Navfree, on the other hand, does not work on my new phone! It goes into la-la land when trying to calculate routes. Hopefully the developer can address that problem. In the meantime, Be-On-Road continues to be a reasonable alternative.
I just got a newer phone, and for whatever reason osmand works better now, in ways that are not just speed-related. Was there some other update? I did not keep track of versions, so I don't know. Anyway, the extraneous navigation commands are gone, which is great!
Routing/re-routing are much faster, but that could just be the more powerful phone; perhaps osmand is not a great idea on older hardware (although my old 1GHz mono-core was fine for everything else). It still has the 200km limit, though.
Another plus is that I just got a map update, and changes I recently made to OSM for my town are already in there! None of the others have caught up so fast.
However, search is still poor, requiring a lot of guesswork to find addresses (entering neighbouring towns when the town it should be under is not listed, etc.).
Navfree, on the other hand, does not work on my new phone! It goes into la-la land when trying to calculate routes. Hopefully the developer can address that problem. In the meantime, Be-On-Road continues to be a reasonable alternative.
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I came some time ago to the conclusion that Sygic was the best SatNav application. I couldn't get on with CoPilot maps. Version 14 is very flexible and even the demo version runs after 7 days! POI import is great but the clincher for me was the quality of the display. I paid
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Another update: I just spent the last month on vacation and tried out the 4 candidates I already discussed in various situations. Some comments:
OsmAnd: To my surprise, I ended up using this one more than the others! I got used to the interface, and the real killer feature for me was the TTS, having the street names spoken for you is huge, I don't know why the others don't do that.
That said, it was not all roses. The extraneous commands issue I mentioned before is not as gone as I thought. It was not so bad in rural areas where there is little ambiguity - luckily where I spent most of my time - but on busy urban multi-lane roads the frequent instructions like "keep right then keep left" just confuse, especially when sometimes "keep right" just means don't turn left, and sometimes it means "exit to the right". I had several wrong/missed turns because of that. This definitely needs to be fixed, either eliminate meaningless commands, or at least make them distinct from meaningful ones.
Navigator:I uninstalled this one. It offered nothing I needed that was not provided by the others, and had the strange habit of sometimes recommending completely needless and lengthy diversions, in one case wanting me to go past my destination all the way to the next town, then doing a U-turn, and going back again, a total of 274km for no fathomable reason! Weird.
The others offered no surprises and worked as expected, but I still prefer NavFree to Be-On-Road.
OsmAnd: To my surprise, I ended up using this one more than the others! I got used to the interface, and the real killer feature for me was the TTS, having the street names spoken for you is huge, I don't know why the others don't do that.
That said, it was not all roses. The extraneous commands issue I mentioned before is not as gone as I thought. It was not so bad in rural areas where there is little ambiguity - luckily where I spent most of my time - but on busy urban multi-lane roads the frequent instructions like "keep right then keep left" just confuse, especially when sometimes "keep right" just means don't turn left, and sometimes it means "exit to the right". I had several wrong/missed turns because of that. This definitely needs to be fixed, either eliminate meaningless commands, or at least make them distinct from meaningful ones.
Navigator:I uninstalled this one. It offered nothing I needed that was not provided by the others, and had the strange habit of sometimes recommending completely needless and lengthy diversions, in one case wanting me to go past my destination all the way to the next town, then doing a U-turn, and going back again, a total of 274km for no fathomable reason! Weird.
The others offered no surprises and worked as expected, but I still prefer NavFree to Be-On-Road.
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Try
Settings > General > Storage directory
This lets me put it on the external card.
Settings > General > Storage directory
This lets me put it on the external card.
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Some changes,and a perspective from a new to GPS user. I tried every free version GPS app on the Play Store
Sygic becomes crippleware after 7 days. It loses voice and turn by turn guidance, but is usable if you have someone with you to read the map.
The previous version of Sygic (a totally new one came out this week) was better than Copilot, which had similar crippling , at setting Favorites and at skipping waypoints. The new version seems even better, but was pushed out before the Support site was updated with a new manual. It's more map-centric, less easy for menu-oriented users to use.
What I wanted from GPS navigator was voice guidance to a foreign location, preferably one that was already in the map. The latter proved to be unachievable.
No app I tried could accurately find\locate more than half the test destinations outside major cites. Even when I could find manually the position on the maps, often there was no existing POI or a simple way to generate a personal POI\favorite.
Very few apps were able to automatically generate a long distance route that came close to what I'd consider optimum for travel time. No consideration was given to qvoiding traffic-dense central businees districts. This might be different with a phone and realtime traffic.
When routes were forced by dragging on map view, the changes often became mandatory waypoints with no simple way to bypass them. The new version of Sygic Nav was the only one I tried with an on-screen skip waypoint function.
If you don't specify waypoints, make every destination a favorite, and look up foreign locations using Google, it's a draw between the CoPilot and Sygic
With Sygic runnng upwards of $40USD and CoPilot $10USD, I'll buy CoPilot and live with it in internal sd for now.
Sygic becomes crippleware after 7 days. It loses voice and turn by turn guidance, but is usable if you have someone with you to read the map.
The previous version of Sygic (a totally new one came out this week) was better than Copilot, which had similar crippling , at setting Favorites and at skipping waypoints. The new version seems even better, but was pushed out before the Support site was updated with a new manual. It's more map-centric, less easy for menu-oriented users to use.
What I wanted from GPS navigator was voice guidance to a foreign location, preferably one that was already in the map. The latter proved to be unachievable.
No app I tried could accurately find\locate more than half the test destinations outside major cites. Even when I could find manually the position on the maps, often there was no existing POI or a simple way to generate a personal POI\favorite.
Very few apps were able to automatically generate a long distance route that came close to what I'd consider optimum for travel time. No consideration was given to qvoiding traffic-dense central businees districts. This might be different with a phone and realtime traffic.
When routes were forced by dragging on map view, the changes often became mandatory waypoints with no simple way to bypass them. The new version of Sygic Nav was the only one I tried with an on-screen skip waypoint function.
If you don't specify waypoints, make every destination a favorite, and look up foreign locations using Google, it's a draw between the CoPilot and Sygic
With Sygic runnng upwards of $40USD and CoPilot $10USD, I'll buy CoPilot and live with it in internal sd for now.
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I'll buy CoPilot and live with it in internal sd for now.
You can move the com.alk.copilot... folder to external sd card effectively moving maps out of internal sd and CoPilot will find them there.
I have used CoPilot on and off and like it's features and flexible configuration options. I have had frustrations with the maps though, most recently at a traffic light making a legal left turn but CoPilot instructing a right turn to a U-turn route 1/4 mile the opposite direction.
You can move the com.alk.copilot... folder to external sd card effectively moving maps out of internal sd and CoPilot will find them there.
I have used CoPilot on and off and like it's features and flexible configuration options. I have had frustrations with the maps though, most recently at a traffic light making a legal left turn but CoPilot instructing a right turn to a U-turn route 1/4 mile the opposite direction.
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My personal problem with KitKkat and extsd was solved.
Apparently this was by Asus, though I'm wondering now if Google is pushing out information, code or development tools to make this use of extsd for data easier. I'm sure they were both receiving a lot of complaints.
Asus also fixed some minor bugs in ZenUI and added tools to make Miracast and inter-device communication simpler.(Two pane screen use is apparently possible now for apps written touse it, though Ihaven't fuund any yet- is L adding multiprocesing?)
The latest Asus system firmware/ZenUI update changed Settings/Apps, giving it a "moveable" view that provides a simple button-push for each user app to move its data on to or off of the extsd.
I now have 3 GB more available space on internal SD. I'll be testing each of these apps to verify that they are using extsd for their data., and checking when they update to be sure they continue to do so.
So even if CoPilot is balky about its being moved, I have room fo it on internal flash.
Apparently this was by Asus, though I'm wondering now if Google is pushing out information, code or development tools to make this use of extsd for data easier. I'm sure they were both receiving a lot of complaints.
Asus also fixed some minor bugs in ZenUI and added tools to make Miracast and inter-device communication simpler.(Two pane screen use is apparently possible now for apps written touse it, though Ihaven't fuund any yet- is L adding multiprocesing?)
The latest Asus system firmware/ZenUI update changed Settings/Apps, giving it a "moveable" view that provides a simple button-push for each user app to move its data on to or off of the extsd.
I now have 3 GB more available space on internal SD. I'll be testing each of these apps to verify that they are using extsd for their data., and checking when they update to be sure they continue to do so.
So even if CoPilot is balky about its being moved, I have room fo it on internal flash.
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Has anyone tried the new one from Nokia yet?
Too bad none of the non-free apps offer Amazon In App Purchase payments for their maps and upgrades. Amazon AppStore Coins can be had for free at various times.
Too bad none of the non-free apps offer Amazon In App Purchase payments for their maps and upgrades. Amazon AppStore Coins can be had for free at various times.
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According to Engadget, Amazon is changing that.
Amazon has made its Appstore for Android obsolete
You will have to read and investigate.
Amazon has made its Appstore for Android obsolete
You will have to read and investigate.
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