Garmin Explore‪™‬ 4+

So my family does amateur paleontology, and because of that we tend to stick to public land and avoid private property like the plague unless we have express consent to be there. When I heard that this had public land marked out on the maps on this app I got super excited! I own a tactix delta and it’s my daily driver, but as I looked at these highly detailed maps...there’s no key. No where to be found. Now maybe in some submenu that I can’t find it’s there, but it’s certainly not apparent. If I have one gripe with this app it’s that it would be wonderful if there was a bright and clearly marked button to present the map key so that I can actually see visually the difference between public and private land on each map. Aside from that this app is a rockstar! It lets us make fuel calculations since we can watch our boating activities live, drop down for a dive when we tie off and switch activities, mark positions of fossil beds, and track back to the boat and the launch all in one app! It’s awesome! But please guys...a key would be amazing! Thanks for all the hard work though that went into building such an awesome app!

I am all in on Garmin so the interoperability between my devices is great but…. Non garmin is an issue. Example. I was back country with a friend. We got separated. He had a different satellite service. I couldn’t reach him because explore with an Inreach device is required in the non cell/internet world. I had to reach a remote friend who then had to copy and manually paste into OnX then reach my friend with my coordinates. Garmin being the best should be the leader in interoperability. They should not worry about losing market share. The triangle rule of “faster, better, cheaper—- pick two”. Will eventually bring them customers. Garmin is not cheaper—- it’s faster and better— always. I repeat do better, lead by example, drive interoperability among your peers. Lives are on the line in the back country. All systems should work to save them. The SAR community needs a leader…. Be it.

Recent updates are a substantial improvement! After a year of use, I have found this app to be a reliable and powerful tool to plan hiking and kayaking trips. However, the Course Creation functionality was previously rather clunky. I was pleasantly surprised by the new interface that defaults to routing along known trails. Rather than dozens of points to (usually poorly) approximate a route, I was able to plan out a winding course with only a few intermediate waypoints. Had a perfect time on that route, navigating from a fēnix.

One feature I’d hope to see added in the future is a way to set a default Collection for recorded activities. Maybe I’m missing something, but recordings currently default to “Unorganized” which becomes such a mess on my local map if I don’t visit the app frequently (weekly) and assign these to a Collection…one by one. Even better would be if the Save step on devices showed some awareness of possible Collections to which to save.

I highly recommend this app. Hats off to the dev team!