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Photo: Albert Hulm
In the children's book "Here comes the duck nonsense, good luck with the bar pig", the duck and her friends plan a trip to where it is most beautiful.
But where is that exactly?
Route planning and navigation apps help to get closer to the answer by showing users new routes, saving their favorite tours and sharing interesting waypoints with others.
Apps such as Komoot, Outdooractive, BRouter and OsmAnd use OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a map, which makes material available to users without license costs, but with the geodata used.
Owners of an OSM user account can also edit the map material and add geographic information.
OpenStreetMap is an alternative to Google Maps, the material of which cannot be changed at will and used for your own projects.
The navigation app from Google reacts very quickly to traffic jams and delays and suggests alternative routes.
Among other things, it gets its information from the behavior of the app users: If, for example, several Maps users drive slowly at one point, Google suspects a disruption to the traffic there.
The way as a goal
With Google Maps, pedestrians and cyclists can get from A to B quickly, but the routes often lead along motorways. If you are looking for a nice tour with sights, a certain surface or opportunities to take a break, tour planners such as Komoot or Outdooractive are more suitable.
Thanks to its large community,
Komoot
now
contains
most of the planned hiking and cycling tours in Germany. App users get inspiration for new paths, take photos and comment on their favorite tours and share them with others. When planning, Komoot takes into account various types of movement such as hiking, walking or cycling, the fitness level and whether you only want to go there or back again. If you just want to record your route, you can track your tour - the app automatically detects whether you are jogging or walking. Komoot is compatible with sports watches from Garmin and Polar, the Apple Watch, navigation devices from Garmin, Wahoo and Sigma and on-board computers from Nyon and Kiox for e-bikes.
Another app with many ready-made tours for different types of movement is
Outdooractive
.
When planning tours, users of the free version can use numerous filter options to create a suitable route.
The sports that can be selected also include Nordic walking, horse riding and canoeing.
Outdooractive shows various symbols on the map, such as viewpoints that users can integrate into their tour.
You can also create your own routes.
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Outdooractive contains extensive information on the destinations, such as accommodation with e-bike charging stations and the current weather situation.
However, the app only shows some routes in the paid Pro version.
With Outdooractive Pro +, subscribers also receive additional tours from Kompass and ADAC hiking guides as well as access to the maps of the Alpine clubs.
Unknown heights
Outdooractive and Komoot users often criticize incorrect altitude information on tours.
When calculating altitude meters, track points and the altitude model used play an important role.
Basically, all climbs from the start to the finish are added up.
If there are too few track points in a prepared route record, ascents in between are lost, which falsifies the displayed altitude difference - if there are too many, the altitude meters can be too large.
With spontaneous changes of direction, Komoot and Outdooractive reach their limits and ask their users to go back to the original route.
The corresponding announcements are very annoying and in some cases are even absurd, because often you deviate from the path because it is blocked or because you want to take a shortcut.
Offline navigation
The
BRouter
web service
and the OsmAnd app react more flexibly to spontaneous excursions into nature and recalculate the route - without any internet connection. For example, to plan a racing bike tour with BRouter Web, users design a route at brouter.de on their computer and then export it as a GPX file. This file format is used to store geodata and is supported by most navigation and route planning apps.
A GPX file can be used in the Komoot app under »Tours« and »Import file«. If the imported route contains sections that do not use the Komoot route network, you can "follow the original route" or "adapt the route to known routes." In the first case, Komoot does not provide navigation for these routes. They are shown in dashed lines on the map.
BRouter offers a variety of setting options for tours in OpenStreetMap notation, which is not necessarily understandable for laypeople. Experts, on the other hand, can enter their own code under "Settings" and "Profile" or use snippets from GitHub. For example, the source code in the repository of GitHub user DRiKE excludes gravel roads from the calculation - an important criterion for racing cyclists. BRouter is also available as an app. For navigation you have to use this together with an app such as OsmAnd,
Locus Maps
or
OruxMaps
.
Another tour app that is good for offline navigation is
OsmAnd
. The operation of OsmAnd is a little more complex than that of Komoot and Outdooractive, which is why beginners have to familiarize themselves with the app first. If that doesn't put you off, you get a tool with numerous navigation and route planning options, a detailed map, the appearance of which can be changed to suit the current sport (such as topo or off-road), as well as a points of interest display and contour lines.
After users have downloaded the maps they are interested in, OsmAnd saves and calculates tours offline and locally, i.e. directly on the smartphone.
It is important to ensure that you only download maps of places that you want to drive or hike, otherwise the memory for photos and videos may not be sufficient.
Bike navigation
If you are looking for a pure bike tour app, there are apps like
Bike Citizens
.
Depending on whether you want to get to work quickly or are looking for a relaxed drive, there are the route options »Comfortable«, »Normal« and »Fast«.
In the premium version, users can download the maps and create heat maps of their journeys.
Perhaps the animals from "Good luck with the bar pig" would have needed a suitable tour app - at the end of the story they simply stay where they are because they find it most beautiful everywhere.
