Awesome for off-grid or international travel – Guru Maps - Navigate Offline Review

Galileo Maps is my go-to app when I'm traveling abroad and either have no data plan for the country I'm in, or (if there's a partner carrier--decently common for my plan) when the data is slow. Since they've added Vector maps, preloading a country or state's maps has been a breeze. It's similarly useful if I travel somewhere off-grid, such as trips through wilderness areas or national parks. I did pay to unlock all the features, and one of those was GPS recording--so not only is the app useful when I'm somewhere remote, but when I am remote, I'm probably hiking/trekking, so it's doubly useful in such situations. The app isn't perfect: it either doesn't do directions, or doesn't do them very well, as I haven't noticed any such feature. Finding locations or points of interest via the search isn't as effective as either Apple or Google maps' searches. The GPS recording has significant issues (on my 6S plus) with "jitter" where it'll sudden record a point where I'm a half mile away and the next point will be accurate. This magically adds a mile to distance-traveled that didn't really happen. This doesn't always happen, and in the past, seemed to happen less, but it's frequent enough to ruin distance measurements for many treks. I'm not sure what made it worse recently. Maybe it was upgrading from 5S to 6S? Or maybe a software change..I have no way to know. I suspect it's more of a problem in urban areas where the phone relies both on GPS and wifi for triangulation. My only other complaint is that pre-loading a phone with raster maps (largely unnecessary now, since they have the very easy to acquire vector ones) is a little challenging. You can either do it within the app by simply moving and zooming the app around--it just caches the data. Of using a desktop Java app to make a bundle. Sadly, that desktop app has a horrid UI, which almost seems like a "protest-UI"--determined not to emulate any other map app UI's. In any case, this app is tremendously useful in the right situations. It's kept my phone from becoming an electronic brick when I leave coverage areas. I could certainly imagine wilderness situations where it could be a lifesaving tool, if the user had the foresight to preload their state/country's map.
Review by Irshi on Guru Maps - Navigate Offline.