I was using Google My Tracks, and liked it just fine. But it got “deprecated” (whatever the dickens that means) and a warning pops up to say it won’t work any longer.
So I tried Map My Walk, and it was fussy and demanded a login and password (which I never had been assigned!)
So I tried Simply Walk, which is nice, but it won’t save a record or map, so I can’t download it to my PC. (Also, it doesn’t show an elevation cross-section, which My Tracks did.) If nothing better is recommended, this is kinda good enough.
So… Anyone know a decent Android app that does GPS mapping of one’s walks and hikes, stores map files for download, and (not necessary, but nice) shows an elevation cross-section? Free is nice, but I’m willing to pay usual Android app rates (i.e. under $15.)
I’m a big fan of Trimble Navigator. Maps your route, with a variety of different map layers (street, topo, aerial photo, hybrid trail map, etc); and has a statistics page that can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about your walk. You can also save individual trips for future reference.
I don’t think I had to pay for it, either. If I did, it was pretty cheap, as I don’t remember being upset about it. It asks to sign in when you start the app, but you can skip it (as I always do).
Does that have some common sense heuristics to ensure sensible data? I tried MapMyRide for my bicycle trips and it was basically useless. If it got a weird GPS result it’d just use it no matter how implausible, and that’d happen at least a few times on a trip. So I’d end up with top speeds of 110mph and three miles more than reality because I apparently took a near instant detour to the middle of a lake.
Good old Google MyTracks never put in spurious “legs” of my travel. So far, Simply Walk hasn’t either. I haven’t yet given Trimble Navigator a good try.
Could it be a malfunction of your GPS locator, not the hiking app?
(I don’t remember which, but one of the apps I was looking at actually had a settings option to ignore “impossible” GPS data.)
I’ll be damned. I just checked myself, and there it was, gone! I use Trimble all the time. Now I have to give some thought before I buy a new phone, not sure I want to be without Trimble.
I use Google Fit. It won’t allow you to export the map to save (that I can see) but it does save the information in app. It also provides an elevation cross section and pace chart. You can choose from multiple activity types when you start the tracking and it will also passively keep track of your steps whether or not you have the app running.
It might not be as robust as some would like but it fits my needs.
I really liked Google MyTracks, and can’t guess why they discontinued it. The elevation cross-section chart is really fun to have! I don’t need it, but I sure do like it!
I loved MyTracks!! Ever since they announced the deprecation I have pretty much forgotten about it. However I have succesfully used it a couple of times (when I remember) since then. I’m looking at two dif hikes I did on 10/24/16 right now.
Seems like the main thing lost is the ability to upload your tracks.
It’s weird, because the little warning says that the program “will stop working after April 30, 2016.” Um…yeah? The program, as you note, does still work. Weird. I’m terribly leery of using it now. Exporting data is nice…
(Simply Walk lets me export pcx data…but Google Earth won’t open it properly. Google Earth accepts it; I can open the file in G.E. But then nothing happens. Nothing gets displayed. So the data would seem to be incompatible at some level.)
I downloaded and installed Google Fit, but haven’t given it a try yet. Later today.