RV Life RV Safe GPS

Gdetrailer wrote:

LouLawrence wrote:
Never heard of it. What's it all about?

Its a GPS "App" for your phone..

I never heard of it.

But personally, have tried GPS App CoPliot free version yrs ago, it was very highly recommended by many GPS owners here on this forum.

For us, GPS on a mobile device it sort of worked and in typical Android fashion of quirkyness and flubs it was clunky to use, took a lot of time to acquire sat signals and best of all the screen location often failed to meet with reality often placing our position off the side of the road and in fields.

And that was the highest most recommended GPS App 5 yrs ago on this forum, one could only hope that has improved some.

Maps and accuracy, if it is free or substantially low cost, it may not be as good as a dedicated GPS or even using Google maps (cellphone Internet data) on your phone.

What's special about this app?

Using a phone/tablet for GSP mapping is really the way to go 99.9999% of the time but as some of the features such as delays, accidents & speed traps are crowd sourced, using the big players is the best option (Waze, Google Maps, etc...). With crowd sourcing, the bigger the "crowd" the faster and better it updates live conditions.

Some notes:
- All GPS take time to get an initial fix from a cold start. Generally if your phone is on and you haven't turned off the GPS, it's not a cold start. Only time we have a minor issue is getting of a plane and starting the mapping...but had the same issue with our old dedicated GPS unit.
- For road based chart plotting, if it's showing you off road (and you aren't clearly well off the road in reality), it's a poor app but haven't seen that in years. Since selective availability has been turned off, it's amazing how accurately they place you. The only time it may have an issue is if you have a closely spaced service drive paralleling the main road but again, this isn't any better with a dedicated GPS unit.
- The big players are free and do great. For a while we ran a dedicated GPS while considering the switch and because the dedicated unit needed manual updates and often the live traffic updates didn't work, we eventually stuffed it in the glove box...it might still be there.
- Most mapping apps have offline options if you will be away from cellular service but still need driving directions. But it's rarely is an issue.

So back to my original question: What is special about this app?