Issues found while touring

[Jorge del Valle]

I just came back from a multi-day touring trip through France and Northern Spain. I relied on downloaded/offline routes in the Android app for navigation, and for the most part it was a really good experience. However there were a few issues that I hope can be impoved/fixed:

1. I couldn't skip waypoints from the waypoints menu at the bottom of the screen, although press-holding brings up a dialog which suggests you can. Weirdly you can re-add an skipped waypoint from there, but not skip it, even though the pop-up dialog you get when you are trying to do either always asks you if you want to skip the waypoint, which is confusing. It would be good if you could both add and remove waypoints from the menu, and if the pop-up dialogues were more clear in reflecting what action is being offered.
2. Related to the first issue: As far as I can tell the only reliable way to skip a waypoint is by tapping its icon on the top-right corner. This caused a problem for me at one point, because I had one of those big banners showing which motorway lane I should be in, which covered the top of the screen. I needed to skip the next waypoint, but I was unable to do it because the waypoint icon was completely occluded by the banner.
3. The worst problem I had: The app would sometimes freeze when trying to start navigating a route while being slightly outside of it (say at hotel parking lot 50m from route start). Once this happened it would freeze consistently every time I tried to start navigation from that location, no matter how many times I killed and restarted the app or the phone. The only solution I found was to navigate to the route and then re-start the app once I was already back in the route. Looked like sometimes it just didn't like a particular location and it would freeze every time I tried to navigate from it. This caused me at one point to take the wrong entrance to a motorway while trying to get back to an "in-route" location that wouldn't cause the app to freeze, and by the time I realized it, it was too late and I had to go several miles in the wrong direction before I could find an exit to turn around.

As I said, the experience was largely very good, with only a few exceptions which caused a bit of frustration sometimes. Hopefully those issues can be ironed out on a future version.

[Con Hennekens]

@Jorge-del-Valle:

1. yes you can! Press an hold any waypoint there for a second, and confirm the choice in the upcoming pop-up.

2. just wait until it disappears and continue the action afterwards.

3. I have never seen the app freeze over this. But anyway, it is better to place your waypoint on the road (ahead in the route) instead of on parking lots or hotel roofs. That can be a reason for the app to not be able to calculate a route.

[Jorge del Valle]

@Con-Hennekens
Thank you for your reply.

On point 1, even though you say you can, I couldn't. I would long-press, get the dialog to confirm I wanted to skip the waypoint, but then the app would still try to direct me to said waypoint. I'm not sure if it's a particular bug to my version of the app (I'm on Android, latest version) but weirdly that's what happened to me.

On point 2, the problem is I was going down a motorway and wanted to skip a waypoint. The banner only disappears if you continue riding for which you have to make a decision on which lane you stay on. So by the time the banner disappeared and I could stop and skip the waypoint, I had taken the wrong lane for the route I wanted to ultimately take by skipping the next waypoint. I hope that makes sense.

On point 3, I did not have a waypoint set at the hotel parking lot. I had it on the road. The app kept fully freezing (not just spinning and trying to calculate a route; just a frozen screen where I had to kill the app every time). This happened to me a few times. Two at hotel parking lots and one at a petrol station, that I can remember.

[Con Hennekens]

@Jorge-del-Valle

1. That's very strange. I can easily gor waypoints forward or back without issues on my Android this way. It would be good to know if more people recognize this behavior.

2. If you decide to deviate from the planned route, I suppose you know which lane to take by the road signs. Why would you deviate from the planned route of you don't know where you want to go? Besides, on these decisive moments, it is better to pay attention to the traffic instead of to the navigation, which you already decides not to follow. It may be a bit simplistic to put it this way, but in my experience usually how it is. If you don't like the nice looking pictures though, you can disable them in the settings. The app will fall back to the simpler lane assistance you usually see also outside the highways.

3. I have no idea how this happens. Have you tried a complete reinstall yet?

[Jorge del Valle]

@Con-Hennekens
Thanks for the replies once again.

1. Agreed that it's weird.
2. In that particular situation I was in a region I didn't know, doing a very long route for the day with very few shaping points. So going by signs didn't help me as I was unfamiliar with the names in them. I wanted to skip the waypoint because I noticed it was giving me some strange navigation directions, and later figure out it was because when I planned the route I didn't realize I had placed it on the wrong side of the motorway. So it was admittedly user error, but I still think it would be good to be able to skip a waypoint without turning off the banners, which I normally do find useful. Of course, this wouldn't be as much of a problem if I could skip nav points using the lower menu.
3. The problem is that the issue didn't happen consistently, so even if I uninstall and it happens to work fine next time I try it, I won't know if it's fixed. It happened 3-4 times on a week long touring trip. Though admittedly reinstalling may be a good idea anyway to see if that fixes issue #1 for me. I'll give it a try.

[Con Hennekens]

@Jorge-del-Valle, Ah yes, placing a wp on the wrong side of the road will lead to unforeseen instructions indeed! I believe that navigating in landscape orientation keeps the skip-WP-tile in view, even when a lane banner shows. Also an idea could be a remote controller with buttons. They offer a skip function by pressing a physical button.

[GT JWR]

@Jorge-del-Valle 3. I've experienced that as well, and as you say, it is an endless freeze unless you kill the app and restart. What I found was that, for whatever reason, I was 'in between' a place of good WiFi reception (for example, in my house), where I would open the app, but not yet start the route. Get into the garage, get on the bike, get ready to go, press start - freezes. I happened to notice that the WiFi signal was very week, and only once I got away from the house (at least a block or two), no matter what I did, the app would not start. If I start the route in the house, all good. Otherwise, I had to wait for that couple of blocks. No idea if this is what it it related to or not, just what seems to occur in my case. Good luck.

[Jorge del Valle]

@GT-JWR To clarify, in my case it was an endless freeze even if I restarted the app, which I did several times. As long as I stayed in that same area the app would freeze as soon as I tried to start navigation. I also don't think in my case it had to do with WiFi as I had downloaded the routes and I had the phone in airplane mode, since I was touring in France and trying to avoid roaming.
That being said, I also tried disabling airplane mode and connecting to the mobile network to see if that would make a difference, but the app would still freeze every time, becoming completely unresponsive. Only moving somewhere else and then restarting the app would fix it.