Reviews for Gaia GPS: Offline Trail Maps

This was once a great app. I used it almost daily for everything from planning trips, marking campsites, tracking adventures, you name it. The price increase had me questioning my need for the premium subscription. The new updates have me questioning my need for this app at all. It takes forever to load, doesn't work half the time, and asks me to log in constantly. I've canceled my subscription after 5 great years and will be looking at alternatives

Keep increasing the subscription price without fixing bugs. Once the app was purchased by Outside it seems to have gone down hill. My subscription price has doubled over the past couple years with minimal improvement to the app. The layers are great and it's generally easy to use but sometime the bugs can be very difficult to work around. I'd recommend CalTopo as a good alternative.

UPDATE: 45-days and still no fix. I won't be renewing. Gaia has for quite sometime been buggy, but now it's really broken. With the latest update (9/24) it no longer syncs correctly. It won't sync my routes or offline maps. If I make changes on my desktop, for example, it won't show up on my phone. No offline maps sync anymore. I've emailed support a number of times with different bugs on this latest version, they only bothered to replied once.

Lately my trail recording has suddenly been awful. Jumpy and inaccurate, and has happened in numerous places, airplane mode on, etc. It had been so good, but something changed recently. Also having issues syncing phone data to the cloud. Just lots of issues lately, unfortunately. Will happily update the review if they're fixed, because it used to be awesome!

Awesome, must have for people into gps maps who want to do some route finding. Edit: This was a really awesome app, but for reasons that are completely incomprehensible to me, they devs have ruined the best feature. You used to be able to easily and quickly create routes that would snap to the contours of the trail. Now, the feature either works jankily, doesn't work at all, or the path snaps to a line diverging from the trail randomly. I am canceling my premium subscription.

I've been using Gaia GPS for a while now for road trips and hikes, and it's been a good experience so far. However, a few issues need to be addressed, the functionality is cumbersome to use. ie: You can't download a gpx file using the mobile app, and you can't delete tracks on the web interface. Also, being forced to pay for a very expensive premium subscription just to access basic offline maps is ridiculous. (Almost every other map app includes this free).

So, now it's required to link an account to use the app... That's what happens when small good companies are acquired by big companies, they just evolve to something worse... I guess it's time to move on to an alternative, not reliably attached to an online account, emails, premium sub promos all the time, etc.

The offline maps are impossibly slow to download (~100Mbps internet). I have a dedicated Android tablet for maps and navigation stuff, and have no such issues with Garmin, OnX, etc. 4 days after reaching out to Gaia support, I have heard nothing back from them. I like the map layouts, prefer the map layouts to most other apps, but you only have that detail if you have an internet connection available. I was going to give this app 2 stars, but then I remembered that I paid $65 for it.

Tracks now have no functionality on the map. I tried converting tracks to routes on my computer, but then I only get half or a third of the track converted due to unspecified errors, even with a good internet connection. Can't upload GPX from my phone, always an error. Outside seems to want to make this into a social media app instead of a mapping app like it's supposed to be.

Gaia remains a good stand-alone app that does a pretty good job doing what it was designed to do. The interface is a tad klunky but it gets the job done. Since being absorbed by the media company, they abused privileges by adding a 2nd login of various privacy and notification settings that hide the fact that they made our profiles public. As a media co., they're shooting for "social", ignoring the fact that all we want is a good gps hiking app. I'll spend my money elsewhere.