About
About Navzeno
We build a map for the parts of Canada where the bars run out — one download, then everything works with the network off.
Why we built this
Every Canadian who drives north has the same story. Somewhere past the last town the signal thins, then goes, and the maps app quietly stops being a map: the blue dot keeps moving over an empty grey rectangle, the route you were following expires, and the search box has nothing to search. It happens on the way to the cottage, on Highway 11 and Highway 17, in Algonquin, on the Bruce Peninsula and along Georgian Bay. It happens every weekend, to a lot of people, in a country where the drive between towns can be an hour of nothing.
That is a solvable problem, and it has been solvable for years. What it needs is a map that never assumed the network was there in the first place.
The offline promise
Navzeno downloads one region — a province — as a single file, over Wi-Fi, before you leave. After that the entire app runs on the device: drawing the map, searching for a place, planning a route, speaking the turns, and rerouting when you miss one. Not cached tiles that run out at the edge of what you happened to look at. The whole province, the whole road network, the whole search index, in your pocket.
The only thing the app ever asks the network for is the region file itself and the list of regions available. Turn the network off after that and nothing about the app changes, which is the test we hold every feature to: if it does not work in airplane mode, it is not finished.
Canada first
We are a small Canadian team, and we are starting where we drive. Ontario is the flagship region — cottage country, the parks, the northern corridors — and it is the one we test against, because it is large enough to be a genuinely hard rendering and routing problem and familiar enough that we notice when something is wrong.
After Ontario: Quebec and British Columbia, then the rest of Canada, then the Canada–US border regions that a road trip actually crosses. Every region on the map catalogue is listed honestly — a region that is planned but not built yet says so and cannot be downloaded.
Built on OpenStreetMap, with our own map engine
The underlying data is OpenStreetMap, the map the world builds together, used under the Open Database Licence. Everything else — the format the region file is written in, the renderer that draws it, the router that plans across it, the search index — we wrote ourselves, because nothing off the shelf carries a road network, a routing graph and a searchable place index in one offline package.
That choice is why the map draws a whole province rather than a downloaded rectangle, and why lakes have their islands and forests have their clearings instead of being flat blue and flat green. It is also why we take the licence seriously: see attribution for who made the data, what the licence requires, and how to correct the map when you find it wrong.
Where it actually is
A few things we will not do, so that the list is useful: we do not describe the map data as complete or verified, we do not claim live traffic or weather, and we do not market a safety-shaped feature — vehicle height and weight restrictions, for instance — until we have measured how well the underlying data covers it. A routing app that is confidently wrong is worse than one that is honestly limited.
Privacy, stated plainly
There is no account. There is no analytics or telemetry in the app. Your position is used on the device to draw where you are and to follow a route, and it is never transmitted anywhere. Your favourites and your GPX files are files on your device and leave it only when you export them. This is not a policy we maintain in spite of the product — it falls out of building something that has to work with no network at all.
The details are in the privacy policy.
Get in touch
Bug reports, a road that routes wrong, a region you want built next, or a partnership — email support@navzeno.com. If you run a park, a campground or a fleet, there is more on for business.