Locus Map is a great outdoor navigation app that I've been playing with and enjoying lately. It is an extremely configurable and powerful app which simply can't be reviewed in one blog post, so I will cover some specific features as I explore them. In this first article about Locus Map I will talk about location sharing.
There are many reasons you might want to share your location, whether as a one-time manual update or through real-time tracking. For hikers, one of the most important reasons is when hiking alone - having someone know your whereabouts could be lifesaving in the event of an accident or emergency.
It is also important to be able to share some specific location on the map, for example a meeting point, a campsite or simply a waypoint, so that others can easily find it.
There are various different ways for location sharing and this app seems to cover them all.
Despite it's name which suggests a viewer, GPX Viewer is a very capable mobile app for navigation, route following and track recording. It is reliable, provides a useful set of features and a nice set of maps that are visually pleasing and useful for hiking. It comes in two versions on Android, the basic free version and the paid Pro version. On iOS it comes only as a paid version.
In this article we will review the Android Pro version, since it comes with a couple of important features that are not available in the free one:
- offline maps
- track recording
The Android Pro version is available for a one-time payment of around 8.50 USD, which in our opinion is well worth the price for a very handy offline navigation app.
GPS Locker is a utility designed to enhance the performance and stability of GPS connections on your Android phone. It is particularly useful in scenarios where maintaining a stable, continuous GPS signal is crucial.
I find it especially useful to:
- prevent losing the GPS connection when switching between GPS-using apps
- enhance the accuracy of the geotagged location in photos I take with my mobile phone
Ever wondered exactly when it truly gets dark? While sunset times are easy to find, it's harder to know how long you’ll have natural light before reaching for your flashlight. LunaSolCal is one of the apps that can provide you this information and I chose it over the other similar apps because it can be configured to display the civil twilight period in a simple widget on my Android phone:
My Lightning Tracker is a great app for tracking lightning strikes worldwide in close to real time. The feature to alert you of lightning strikes close to you can be very valuable for hikers, specially during the summer when sudden thunderstorms are not rare.
Gaia GPS is a mapping and navigation app for Android, iPhone and the web. It is quite popular in the US and Canada due to a large number of specialized map layers for these countries, such as hunting, fishing, historic, public land and others, as well as some premium basic maps such as National Geographic Trails Illustrated. Hikers in the rest of the world can use the maps that are usually available with other navigation apps, which are based on OpenStreetMap.
The web app is a great choice for route planning, while the mobile app excels in navigation, track recording and aims to do so in following routes. Together, the web and mobile apps provide a nice platform for storing and organizing your recorded tracks, planned routes, waypoints and even photos.
The web and mobile apps are synced through the Gaia Cloud linked by your user account. This makes it a great platform for planning routes on your desktop and having them readily available in your app, without having to do any manual file transfers.
Gaia GPS was generally well regarded in the hiking community until it was purchased by Outdoor Magazine in 2021 and became part of the Outside+ suite of products. That's when the costs of using the app started to raise, together with privacy concerns among the community.
Funded by the US National Science Foundation, implemented at the University of Minnesota, the "Flyover Country" mobile app is a very useful, unique and free app for Android and iOS, which enriches the exploration experience using offline maps whether you're flying, travelling by car, or trekking through nature's wonders. It is voted one of the best science apps available today by Popular Mechanic.
PeakFinder is an app designed to help users identify mountains and peaks in their surroundings. The app uses augmented reality technology, the GPS receiver and built-in sensors of your mobile device to overlay information about the names and elevations of mountain peaks onto the camera view.
This little cool app is designed for classical orienteering and provides various features to help users find the direction and distance to their desired destinations. It is a versatile tool for orienteering enthusiasts and outdoor adventurers who need a digital solution for navigation. It combines traditional map and compass techniques with modern technology to assist users in finding their way to a specific location.
This is the first app I use when I need a quick insight of the direction and aerial distance to a geographical mark. It's also great for figuring out what village, river, lake or mountain you're looking at in the distance, and how far it actually is. I find this to be a very satisfying and nice tool. But there's a caveat - it only works if you have an internet connection as it relies on online Google maps. It would be fantastic if it could work with offline Google maps, but currently it does not.
Glympse is an application that specializes in real time location sharing. A free version is available with features that are sufficient for hikers.
Glympse is a fast, free, and simple way to temporarily share your real-time location with anyone. The tracking is based on GPS, is temporary and secure – and Glympse recipients don’t need to download an app to see the shared location - they will instead receive a link which they can open in any web browser, on their computer or mobile. The web page in the browser will display a map with approximately the last kilometer of the shared trail.
AGPS-TrackerOm is an interesting 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. It can also provide enhanced accuracy of your current elevation, by using altitudes from NASA-generated Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) instead of the GPS-provided elevation which can be quite inaccurate.
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
