Seeking GPS app which is map independent

By Deborah Armstrong, 1 August, 2013

Forum
iOS and iPadOS
So I have found many apps that do this, but so far none that are accessible. The scenario is common for sighted folks. They can't remember where they parked their car. The app lets them "bookmark" a location and return to it with breadcrumbs later. It uses the GPS, but not a map. You can see many apps to solve this problem. I thought the MyWay app would do this, but it turns out it won't run on iPAD or iPOD Touch because it requires the compass. Many of the visual apps that let you return to landmarks work fine on the iPAD or iPod Touch, providing you use an external GPS. We'll be driving across the country on vacation in a few weeks and I don't have an iPhone yet. I do have Navigon and an external GPS. Both work great, but the feature I would use most when we travel is simply the ability to return to a marked location. For example, I need to find our truck in the parking lot, pull out a suitcase and return to our hotel room. An app that would help me do that would make me feel more independent! Any thoughts?

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By djolney on Friday, August 23, 2013 - 11:57

I have played with getting it to memorize a walk, but not had to rely on it to find a point in something like a big car park.

Don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but Ariadne GPS does let you create bookmarks and give you a clockvise direction to it, as well as the distance to your stored landmark. It uses the internal compas, so if your device don't have a compas, you're probably out of luck on this one too. But it also calculates you're direction based on GPS after you've walked a few feats, so that might be an option. It also lets you set an alarm for a given distance from you're landmark. But no turn by turn instructions are available, as far as I know. Only the clock direction to your saved landmark. Don't know if this is of any help, but it might as well be what you're looking for. I use it a lot in open areas, where street navigation is of no use, to mark certain important landmarks, such as a beginning of a shortcut, that's not a valid street on other map apps, or even buss-stops, so I can set an alarm for when I'm approaching it while on the buss. I guess you could also mark the place where you got your car parked with some degree of acuracy. But as you probably know, every GPS based navigation is acurate to within a range of 10 - 30 feat, so you'll never get exactly spot on... Hth, an have a nice vacation! :)