Navigation, turn-by-turn and offline routing
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Since July the rider app has been able to turn any track into a rally-style tulip roadbook — the Rally side of the Road ⇄ Rally toggle reads the corners straight off the GPX shape, no road network required. It was a document: something to scroll with a thumb at a fuel stop. Today it becomes a navigation mode.
This was the week we stopped trusting the navigation and started measuring it. Real rides, real device logs, and a string of bugs that had been hiding in plain sight — one of them for three months.
Two weeks ago the map stopped being flat: the routing graph learned elevation, the road score grew a climb axis, and the server could finally tell a mountain road from a merely bendy one. All of it, though, lived behind an API. This week it reaches the phone.
We route motorcycles through the Alps. This week we discovered that, as far as the software was concerned, the Alps were not there.
No new screens this week. Instead: the data underneath every screen got fresh, and stays fresh, and now tells us when it isn't.
Two threads this week, and they meet in the same place: the moment you stop looking at a phone and start riding.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about a navigation app for adventure riding: the better the road, the worse the coverage. The places worth going are exactly the places your phone gives up.
So this fortnight we made the phone stop needing us.
A week ago FastGIS was a browser tool for running GRASS modules. This week it learned to plan a motorcycle route — and it turns out those two things want the same foundations.