No, not really.

I have two other offline mapping apps I am using to compare here. Navionics, a boating map and PocketEarth, a roadmap. Both are reliable, quick, vector-based maps and I trust them to cache downloaded maps and display them without connectivity.

Gaia is not like that. First, it downloads bitmaps, which means that the zoom level at which you download is important -it doesn’t scale well up or down afterwards. It is also horribly slow at displaying terrain and often leaves big gaping holes of blank spots. This is my main beef with Gaia - you never quite know if it is displaying something because it cached it or whether it’s just getting off the network. Of course, you can always take it for a hike and find out what it missed ;-)

The other thing is that just gobbles storage space to, again, not cache very much. And, again, especially with the multiple layers, it’s never been particularly easy for me to tell what was actually downloaded where.

If anything, I rely on PocketEarth more when hiking because at least I expect my maps to be available. Yeah, it will be a lot of blank green terrain with few markers of viewpoints. Nothing like a topo map. But at least it will be there and I will have rough idea of my position.

Now, I know that both Navionics and PocketEarth work much better because they can get away with just loading vector, basically numerical data, for sea and roads. Terrain maps have it tougher, it’s not just keeping tracking of roads between cities, you need to track all the elevation and terrain info. So, I appreciate that Gaia has its work cut out.

I just don’t happen to think that Gaia handles it particularly well, sorry.

jl_yvr about Gaia GPS Classic, v9.2.2