Several feature requests for the app
Hello,
I've had this installed for a short period and have purchased the premium option. I'll be hiking hundreds of miles in Canada, starting June and have bought it for that. It looks like a great app but I have a few ideas to improve it:
- A dark mode would be fantastic to increase the run time for OLED based devices.
- An option to switch off GPS in app to save battery life (I realise I can do it from the phone's menu but it's obnoxious to do it this way).
- Premium maps should be viewable for 2 hours prior to making a purchase, so that people know what they're buying.
- Ability to load Garmin .fit files *
- Improve the map download feature, so that you can draw a rough line rather than squares or even tell it what place you want to cover and it splits it up into several downloads. At the moment, I have to draw a square, if it's too big I can't download, then draw another square hoping to get it matched up with the previous square. I'd rather draw around the area I want to download and if it's too many tiles, then it says "this will be three downloads totalling XX gb"
- Show the progress of the map download. I don't honestly know if it's doing anything (unless I check with a net monitoring tool).
Point 4 is as complicated as you want it to be. It would be nice if I could connect my watch via USB-OTG to my phone and use the .fit file in your app. This part shouldn't be too difficult to code. The Garmin Connect app relies heavily on the internet and you cannot even view your track unless you have the internet.
Additionally, it would be even nicer if I could then export the .fit file as a GPX, from your app, and be able to import that into a Google Fusion table later on. I have been working on a publicly viewable map using Google Fusion tables, and I'd love something like that.
Using your services I can see my hikes on a privately viewable map but I don't believe there's a way to make it publicly viewable? My apologies if I'm mistaken.
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Sorry to be picky... When I log into this help site it uses the first portion of my email address as a username. I changed my name, then when I log back in it changed it to the old name. Something similar happened when I registered for the app. I've contacted support and they have resolved this, I think. It might be a good idea to let people pick a username upon registering (I'm not a lover of private information being made public).
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Thanks for posting.
It is possible to view the progress of your offline map downloads in the app. Check these articles for steps on how this is done: iOS/Android.
You can share a link to your hikes by creating a shareable link. This can be done in the app or on gaiagps.com:- iOS: https://help.gaiagps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000347287-Sharing-Your-Data
- Android: https://help.gaiagps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000347287-Sharing-Your-Data
- gaiagps.com: https://help.gaiagps.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003523847—Share-and-Make-your-Tracks-Routes-Waypoints-and-Folders-Public-Private-from-gaiagps-com
Also, thanks for your comments about usernames in the help center. I'll discuss this with the team.
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Thank you for the reply and the links. I've edited this post because I encountered some strange behaviour fixed by rebooting the phone. When I closed the app, it continued to say the map was downloading but it wasn't doing anything. When I opened the app, it was downloading something but it never finished and I couldn't see the progress.
After rebooting the phone, I can now see the app is downloading the map and it shows the progress correctly in the downloads folder.
For others facing similar issues with downloading large tracks, Nathan replied via email prior to responding here and was very helpful. He explained to me that you can select a track and download a map around it, which is pretty neat! I am downloading a larger area beyond the track, so I still think it would be cool if you could select multiple squares to download or draw what you want but this solves most of it for me. Additionally, being able to select multiple tracks and then "download around tracks" would save a bit of time as opposed to going through them one by one (I have a lot of tracks to download).
In regards to sharing hikes, I believe that generates a link for each hike but you cannot share a map with all the hikes as per a fusion table? Perhaps I've misread something.
As a general navigation app, it seems underrated and other than the download problem (now mostly resolved with the "download around track feature"), it works well. I appreciate the replies. I will try think of some more ideas your team might like :).
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I've updated my previous post to include hyperlinks for the articles on how to check the download status of your offline maps.
To also share an offline map for your route, you will need to file the route and an offline map for the area in a folder and then use the Shared Folder feature to share the contains of the folder (iOS/Android).
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