AGPS-TrackerOm is an interesting and quite a robust Android application. It's main function is to follow preloaded tracks and record your tracks, and tries to do so reliably - ensuring that the GPS data is recorded at all times, even when the phone goes into stand-by mode. This means you won't get surprise straight lines in your GPX tracks. It can also provide enhanced accuracy of your current elevation, by using altitudes from NASA-generated Digital Elevation Models (DEMs).
AGPS-TrackerOm (previously called A-GPS Tracker++), differs from the lighter version, A-GPS Tracker in the following:
- AGPS-TrackerOm uses offline maps maintained by OpenStreetMap, which you need to preload. The "lighter" A-GPS Tracker uses Google maps which are not available offline.
- You can download Digital Elevation Models (DEM) which allow the app to display altitude contour lines and provide DEM altitude along with GPS altitude, the former being more accurate
Platform
AGPS-TrackerOm is available on Android.
Main Features
The main features of AGPS-TrackerOm are:
- Works offline with preloaded maps
- Follow a preloaded GPX track
- with alerts when leaving the track ("path monitor")
- with the north always at the top or with your direction at the top of the screen (navigation mode) - you can switch between the two modes with a click of a button.
- Reliably record trails in GPX files, store them and export
- Track the altitude on the trail, both DEM (Digital Elevation Models) and GPS based
- Rich statistics view of the recorded trail
- Mark waypoints along the way (stored in GPX)
- Take photos, which you can export together with your GPX track
- Show elevation contour lines based on Digital Elevation Models
Using the App
A help page is available on the AGPS Tracker website.
App Overview
The interface is intuitive and practical. All the important action in the app happens on a single screen, which is very handy during hikes. Your position and walked path are clearly visible in the main part of the screen. The top of the screen is reserved for the most important information, i.e. time elapsed, distance, current elevation (GPS and/or DEM), along with the handy compass for quick orientation. On the right side are icons for invoking and managing different operations such as route tracking, recording, adding waypoints and taking photos:
In the above screenshot, we are following a track (blue trail) and also recording our own (pink trail).
Most of the operations are accessible as pop-up windows, with intuitive controls for removing them, providing more details, etc. As an example, the following screen shows the Recorder pop-up window, which itself has controls for stopping, saving, resetting the recording and detailed information about the trail recorded so far:
Reliable Tracking
In order to try to ensure that the GPS measures are recorded at all times the app presents a few screens on first launch with simple steps to set the critical permissions for the app:
Once you've selected the suggested settings you don't have to worry about them in further app invocations. Still, on a few occasions the app did stop working on my mobile and the part of the track after the app stopped was not recorded. Due to this unfortunatelly I can't say the tracking with this app is fully reliable.
Recording a Trail
Recording a trail is a joy with this app, with all the information intuitively accessible. Once you press the "REC" button, you will see the "Track recorder" window from which you can manage your recording (Stop/Save/Reset) and view the brief or expanded version of the stats. You can also enable the view of the elevation graph, with the GPS and DEM graphs displayed side by side, very handy!
Following a Track
You can follow a preloaded GPX track. With the "Path Monitor" option turned on, the app will alert you when you divert from the track for more than 30 meters.
The easiest way to load a GPX file that you've created on or downloaded to your computer is to use an external storage service such as Dropbox or GDrive. On your computer copy your GPX file to such a service, and from the AGPS-TrackerOm "GPX Tracks" menu select "Import Track" and open the file from the external service.
Complaints
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Although the app mostly records the track without interruptions, I did have a couple of sessions where it was terminated by the OS and the track was not fully recorded. This could have been caused by something in my phone settings, but still - I've followed all the given instructions and the problem still occurred.
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The DEM based elevation is only available while the track is being recorded - you can see the DEM elevation of the current location on screen and you can see the graph of the DEM/GPS altitude while the track is being recorded. However, once the track is saved in the GPX file, it is saved only with GPS based elevation, so your DEM based altitude seems to be lost! I'd love to be able to reference it, specially for the total ascent/descent of the track.
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I had an issue saving my first GPX track, turned out that the default directory assigned by the app didn't exist, so ensure the dir exists before saving a track.
Rating
As of October 2023, the app has been downloaded 50K+ times on Google Play, and has a rating of 4.6 out of 1.2K reviews.
Pricing
AGPS-TrackerOm is free, but it contains adds at the bottom of the screen. These are not intrusive, but they can be removed with a once off payment of approximately $6. Note that currently there's no option to remove adds from the app menu, instead a small pop-up message is occasionally displayed on app startup.
Final Notes
While preparing this post I tried to contact the AGPS-TrackerOm author about considering an option to include the DEM based elevation into the GPX, but I got very sad news as a reply:
We have to inform you that unfortunately the creator and main developer of A-GPS Tracker, Giorgio Battistoni (gio bat) passed away in May (2023) due to a lightning-fast cancer.
We, his family, decided to honor his memory keeping the app alive and we are working hard to recover everything.
All of your feedback is welcome to help us improve.
I'm sure that many readers will share my opinion that Giorgio has created a wonderful app which will be used with joy as long as todays rapid-evolving technology allows us.
