ViewRanger: Hike, Bike or Walk 4+

ViewRanger is absolutely the best outdoor navigation app for your phone or watch. I have used it for ten years. It has the widest selection of maps and the ability to plan routes, download routes from others, and save your own points of interest. You can save maps to your watch and navigate without your phone. If it had a step counter and connected to a heart rate monitor I wouldn’t need any other app for fitness or navigation. It would also be nice if you could record tracks directly on your watch. Currently your watch has to be tethered to your phone to record a track. It would also be nice if you could record points of interest directly on your watch.

I stumbled across this app recently when looking for a replacement to my current GPS logger. It’s pretty feature-full, while still being simple enough for most people to use. The peak identifier is excellent and makes hikes more interesting.

Some things that need improvement:

- This app requires manual syncing of your tracks and trails. Why can’t it just automatically sync its data like every other app? I’ve also run into issues where I delete routes/tracks on my device, then when I sync, it re-downloads what I deleted from the server. Very frustrating.

- Apple Watch has become very unreliable. Whenever I used to start a track, the watch would show me how much I have left. It just doesn’t do that anymore. It will show the graph for distance remaining, but it’s useless because it’s completely inaccurate and doesn’t update.

- I’m not interested at all in a social feed aspect of trail tracking. It would be nice to not have to have this front and center every time I go to the page that has my routes and tracks.

- The settings can be a bit confusing and convoluted. For example, under Settings > GPS, there is a switch for GPS on or off. I don’t know the purpose of this. GPS automatically goes on when you start making a track, why is there a separate switch here?

I am a subscriber, but will likely be canceling due to these frustrations (particularly with Apple Watch, which was not happening before).

I’ve been trying this app out in order to track the areas I walk around Gaborone Botswana. So far I am pleased with it. I’ve been able to record trails that I walk in the woods, add interest points, and add photos of interesting things to each path. It also records the time and distance of each trail. I hope to go beyond the trails I already know and walk in new places without getting lost! I feel confident that this app will help me to achieve this. My only concern is that if I accidentally swipe the app up while walking, I will loose the maps that were loaded while at home with WiFi. I do not have the ability to reload through my phone service.