NParks Explore A Route (NEAR‪)‬ 4+

the community wall don’t need in my opinion. this app more to motivate you to go there run trails but lack the learning about nature that i was expecting

One has to wonder who developed this app, and what sort of brief NParks gave to them. A lot of effort seems to have gone into creating interactivity, like ‘create your own trail’. Arguably that is fun, but few people are interacting with it, cos … who cares? I just wanna to the park; I don’t care how you got to the park from where you live 😂The most basic functionality (e.g. “where are the trails near me, and how do I get there?”) is absent/complicated. They don’t use Google or Apple maps (fair enough), opting instead for the SG Gov OneMap … but it doesn’t even sync with that or auto-launch that app if you have it installed. Frankly … an old-fashioned paper map would be better than this. It needs redesigning from scratch with priority given to helping humans find their way to nature, explore it, and get home again. Forget trying to build a social media experience!

Needed to hike 10km as part of my training for an overseas trip. Chose the Northern Explorer Loop which the app claimed is 10km long.

1) agree with other reviews that there’s no guide on how to go from where I am to the nearest point (or any selected checkpoint) of the selected trail. It will be great to know which MRT stations, bus stops, car parks and motorcycle parking lots are available along the trail. I had to randomly pick Yishun Park out of all possible starting points (headache already).

2) The app said the loop is “10km long” so I assumed all highlighted paths shown on the map make up the 10km. We found out the hard way that following the app, we have clocked ~18km from Yishun Park to Gambas Ave (and we were not even back where we started). Needed to be creative and find shortcuts and the nearest bus stop to return to our starting point. The distance estimate is completely off and caused me to walk double of what I intended.

Now I understand the 2.9 rating of the app. Why give us a useless feature to “build our own trails” instead of maximising the value from your existing infrastructure and actually provide the basic/useful information required for us to enjoy our trails?