What's your favorite GPS app for iPhone 5?

[hikerbrian]

It has been several months since this topic has come up directly on VFTT, so I'm curious to hear about peoples' latest experiences.

There are several online reviews that recommend Gaia GPS ($20), and a friend of mine recommended NoeTreksGPS (free app, but the maps cost money). Does anyone have experience with these or others? I can (and have) read many online reviews, but I'd like to hear about personal experiences.

To give some direction to the "It depends" answer, I plan to use this app to provide my location in the event that visibility is poor or I'm bushwhacking; e.g. Which drainage am I in? What is my position on this flat ridge? etc. It will function as a supplement to map and compass for navigation and be used only when needed.

I'm also interested in people's experiences with plotting routes and such (and I did see this this post from last year), but I don't plan to use my smartphone for this, considering the battery problem.

[Please, please, PLEASE, this is not a thread on the relative merits of smartphone GPS vs dedicated GPS. It is not a discussion of the fallibility of GPS vs. map and compass. And it is not a thread about GPS-enabled risk taking. Those are all good topics, but for this thread, let's stick to the title question.]

Thanks!

 

[sardog1]

For my iPhone 4s I've been very happy with iHikeGPS. The app costs $7.99 but maps are free. I haven't run any battery tests, but I'm sure it sucks power at an alarming rate. If you preload the maps you'll need, you can avoid some of that in the field.

 

[Guthook]

I'll put in a vote for Gaia GPS. It occasionally goes on sale for half price (I got it for $9.99 at some point), so keep an eye out. I've also tried "Topo Maps" ($7.99, and not bad at all, but less features than Gaia), and MotionX GPS (can't remember price, but cheap).

Of the ones I've tried, Gaia is the simplest and most functional. With about ten minutes of playing around with it, I had figured out how to make waypoints, create breadcrumb tracks, switch to various types of maps, download maps for offline use, transfer GPX files by email, and pretty much everything else I do with my Garmin eTrex (with the added benefit of being able to switch between USGS topos, OpenCycleMap topos, and satellite view). With the app on and tracking my hike, I've had a battery drain of about 50% for a 6 or 7 hour hike in warm weather. It won't replace my eTrex, but for a backup or an occasional use, it's pretty great.

 

[Sabra]

I use the AllTrails application for iPhone. It is free, has good maps and serves me well. It allows to take pictures and when I look at the track after the hike it shows where on the track the pictures were taken. It shows a decent statistics including a profile of the hike, average and max speed, and when I look at the track on the computer I can point the cursor on the profile curve and follow each point on the track.

The biggest problem I have with it is the iPhone battery life. Especially in the winter, the battery drains very quickly. With regards to the GPS accuracy, I agree with some comments made on another thread - the accuracy of the iPhone GPS is not bad, but it is not as good as the Garmin GPS device. Overall, I like using the iPhone to track my day hikes, but to be safe, and definitely for hikes longer than a day, we always take the Garmin with us, with some extra sets of batteries.

Here is an example of the track I recorded when last hiked Jefferson, last spring -

 

[Daniel Eagan]

sorry to resurrect this so late, but has anyone had experience with Avenza PDF Maps? (http://www.pdf-maps.com/)

My problem with some of the above maps is that they require a Facebook account or setting up a separate account

 

[JustBob]

What Guthook said. Gaia is worth the price, even if it's not on sale.

 

[Maineman]

I also use Gaia and it is excellent. I use it in conjunction with the WMG Online to load the tracks for my upcoming hikes. Plot the route using the WMG Online, then I load the track into Google Earth and save it as a .kml file.

Choosing "export to GPS" in WMG Online produces a .gpx file that Gaia doesn't understand completely - it just shows waypoints, just choose "open in Google Earth" from the WMG Online, then "Save Place As" in Google Earth (be sure to use .kml as the file type, not .kmz)

I save my .kml ytracks to a Google Drive folder on my computer. If you also have Google Drive on your phone it makes it a very simple process to load tracks into Gaia - you just select the track from your Google Drive and try to open it, you will be prompted to choose an app to open it with, and you just choose Gaia.

This is very handy when redlining when I may do several different hikes on a given day depending on my speed & energy - I keep several redline hike tracks saved on the google drive so I'm always ready.

FYI - you can select HUGE portions of the Whites and pre-load the topo maps in Gaia making a system that never requires a data signal once you leave the house.

 

[TJsName]

...you can select HUGE portions of the Whites and pre-load the topo maps in Gaia making a system that never requires a data signal once you leave the house.

I don't have an iphone, but the app I use (Kimble's 'Backpacker GPS Lite') has the same feature and it's great. I loaded in about 8 different zoom levels for the northern counties of NH and it works great. The only issue is that the maps are the USGS maps, so they don't have all the trail re-routes, so I still use the paper map sometimes, but it's much easier than using a compass to figure out where you are.

 

[Guthook]

The only issue is that the maps are the USGS maps, so they don't have all the trail re-routes, so I still use the paper map sometimes, but it's much easier than using a compass to figure out where you are.

I don't know Backpacker's app, but in Gaia and many other GPS apps, using Open Street Map's cycle or terrain maps has a better chance of showing recent reroutes of trails, since the map data is a huge open source project.

Do any of you in this discussion have any experience with Chimani's national park apps?

Also, not to sound sound like I'm advertising, but I'm working on some big WMG-style improvements for my apps in New England, like planning routes and making elevation profiles. Mostly for my own amusement, but hopefully others might find it entertaining, too

 

[mcdxcvii]

To view Open Street Maps offline + pre-planned routes & points of interest, consider Maps with Me.

My favorite is EasyTrails because it supports:

• Pre-planned routes
• Points of interest
• Recording log of trip, which is very light on battery usage when screen is turned off

Best of all, it supports user created offline cartography. That is, I scan my favorite map, geotag it with the correct coordinates, & load it into the app for reference. Usually, the maps I scan have all the correct trails & reference information for best use on my trip. While the app does not support offline maps such as Open Street Map, this ability to load my own maps works far better.