RV LIFE - RV GPS & Campgrounds 4+

The app/planning tool has a lot of nice features. Currently, I am planning a 30 day road trip and find it very helpful. I like that I can use the web based tool on my PC and the App on my iPad and iPhone. It’s very versatile. The mapping/route planning feature gives us assurance that the roads are safe for our 40’ motor home. And, the research options make it easy to find campgrounds, points of interest, restaurants, etc. I particularly like that it shows where the campgrounds are on the map. I think it would be helpful if they color coded the campgrounds based on ratings. The calculations of mileage, time, and expense are also helpful. I used the export function to export the trip details into an EXCEL spreadsheet. Very easy. I was disappointed that the exported file did not have separate columns for gas, campsites, and food. That would really enhance the budgeting capabilities.

We are full-time RVers going strong for 1 year and have used this app for trip planning. We depend on this app 100% and even use the RV Safe GPS. Yes, the estimated eta is conservative and we always arrive at our destination earlier than the estimate compared to Waze, Apple, and Google estimates, but I think that’s because most safe RVers drive slower than the marked speed limit. There are settings for entering your max speed on the highways which you can experiment with.

My only negatives are very minor with the GPS. In the older versions of the app, we only had one incident where we were directed down a back road that was was one way and narrow with tight turns where an adjacent main road would have been desired. Also, the new 4.0 version map display seems to have issues. I’ve had to kill the app and restart it to reset the map and remove splotches of graphical objects. In addition, the CarPlay map seems to be zoomed way in and I’d like to be able to zoom it out a bit.

Overall, I love the app and will continue to use it. GPS part just needs some work still. I’m an app developer and sometimes wonder why they don’t just tap into the Waze or Google map API. I would especially appreciate the turn by turn voice from one of their engines rather than the robotic sounding one.

The UI is horrible and I can’t explain how terrible the navigation part is. Don’t rely on it. I’ve missed so many exits and been routes into dead ends so many times I lost count. It’s also at least 2 blocks behind on your location. It’ll say something like turn left from the left two lanes, but there’s 2 or 3 exits on that side and it doesn’t say an exit number or road to follow. The map can never figure out if I’m zooming or rotating the map. Why would I rotate? This was nice at first. I paid for it. Then I routed to so many rest stops that have been closed for years apparently.
There’s no way to update the app data. It’s useful for looking up some parks. The directions on the exact same route are often dead wrong. It tells you a super confusing but entirely wrong next turn OFTEN in cities, and doesn’t even label the highway you’re getting on (Ex:“275 North”) so you can self correct.

Most recently I’ve noticed whenever you leave the app, it snaps back to your current location. The stupidest possible choice for a travel app. So you click on an rv park in another stage, go to their webpage to check it out, and when you come back you have to re-scroll around to find that area again because it snapped back to your current location. None of the developers have ever used this app.