Naviki

I had purchased this application following a friends experience, who is a MTB rider. Upon first impressions the interface was well presented and user friendly. As the user, you may select the distance and whether you are looking for a round trip, alternatively you may locate and navigate a single destination. If you’re a rider of a certain discipline, you can purchase additional “plugins” which allow the application to provide a more specific route. There are further options such as turn by turn navigation speech, which is arguably a necessity. All was good, until you start your journey. I had purchased the turn by turn navigation and the racing plugin for my road bike on the basis the application suggests this to avoid unpaved, or other unsuitable surfaces. I had asked the application for a round trip of a distance of 100 km. On setting off, all was well, the turn by turn was working, however, if you’re using Bluetooth headphones with no music, then the time it takes (seconds) to connect the application to the headphones with the guidance, you have missed your turn and have to circle back… this is improved if you’re listening to music, which being in the road, I am not a fan of. Therefore, a nice addition (which arguably should be standard) but it’s not functional. Moving onto the route guidance and noting the additional purchase of racing to ensure suitable terrain, the route took me to a section of 10.4 KM which was in the middle of a farmers field, which transpired was not suitable and later to find private land. (Un)fortunately I am on a training holiday so did not understand what the upset farmer was saying however but was somewhat angry with the application developers. Whilst some may suggest that I should be vigilant, the rough terrain was not until halfway in, and the angry farmer was towards the end… In conclusion the application is a nice idea, and it’s cheap which is why I am not too bothered about refunds, however, I am not happy about cycling a high end race bike on this route which later resulted in placing me onto a busy road to complete the “return leg” of the journey and 40 km short of the original distance. Avoid at all costs and learn from other experience.

The record journey facility is not working on Apple phone. None of my recorded journeys are saved. All cycle journeys made show up as 0 km despite navigation working & picking up my movements. No response to my email to company. Hopefully the Academic Bike challenge will use a different app next year!

voice nav doesn’t work despite paying for upgrade. disappointing .

The Good: This is a one off payment app with options to further enhance the experience with some in app purchases. As such it seemed a good value alternative to the subscription based route finding and navigation apps that seem to dominate the marketplace. You can plan routes and some of the loop routes it creates are ok, though rarely brilliant. It does actively try to route you down less busy roads, though I suspect it simply chooses B roads as I doubt it uses up to date traffic data. It also has the option to import .kmz and .gpx routes via the website, which appears a big bonus, until you try to use them, about which, more below. The Bad: The navigation is near impossible to understand, particularly on approach to roundabouts. On my first ride I approached a 7 way roundabout. Naviki told me to “turn half-left on street”. I took the first road. “You have left the route. Naviki has recalculated your route. Please turn back. Turn half-left on route.” I tried the next road. “You have left the route. Naviki has recalculated your route. Please turn back.” This happened on every road except the last. So “half-left” (which, by the way Naviki, is not a thing) turned out in this case, to mean “right”. Another common error is being told “continue on route”, only to be told a short while later, “You have left the route. Naviki has recalculated your route. Please turn back.” After retracing your route and consulting the map, you will realise that you should have made a turn that the app doesn’t recognise as a different road. It’s also worth noting that the option to have Naviki ‘recalculate’ your route has never, at least in my experience, resulted in anything other than an instruction to “please turn back”. Getting back to that file upload option I mentioned. If you log into your account via the website you can indeed upload route information from .gpx and .kmz files. Unfortunately, before you can use these routes, Naviki will insist on creating its own, recalculated version. Initially I thought that this wouldn’t be a problem, surely it would find the same roads and any minor differences would be barely noticeable. Unfortunately, though this occasionally works, more often than not the resultant route is just a hot mess. I uploaded a popular 54 mike loop route through The Peak District recently. By the time Naviki recalculated it, the distance was 136.5 miles and the map looked like a toddler had attacked it. Finally, while it is nice that it has trip recording functions, it simply doesn’t have the range of options that apps like Strava or MapMyRide do, which means you will inevitably end up using one those apps too, prompting a very fast drain on your phones battery. In conclusion, this could be a good app but it falls short on almost every count. It is feature rich, reasonably priced and, with only one or two exceptions, fairly user friendly as an interface. It’s just that none of the features quite work properly. Navigation is confusing and frequently wrong, recalculation is non-existent, route upload is pointless and ride recording is basic. Desperately needs improvement.