Turn-by-turn navigation

Once you have a route you like, tap Start. Everything from here happens on the device: the snapping, the distances, the prompts and the reroute.

The first time you ever start navigation, the app asks you to read a short notice — follow local signage and road conditions; restrictions in the map data may be incomplete — and you confirm it once. It means what it says; see the safety note at the bottom.

The banner

While you are navigating, a banner sits across the top of the map:

• The distance to the next turn, first and largest, counting down.
• The manoeuvre in words: Turn left onto Bay Street, Continue on Highway 11, At the roundabout, take the 2nd exit onto Muskoka Road 118, Take the exit toward 400 North.
• Then — the manoeuvre after that, in small type, so you know whether the next two come in quick succession.
• Along the bottom: your arrival time, the time remaining and the distance remaining.
• A Steps button, which opens the whole list of turns.
• A red End button, which stops navigation and returns the map to north-up.

Before the first location fix arrives the banner says Waiting for a fix…, and while a new route is being worked out it says Rerouting….

Street names and roundabouts

Instructions use the street name where the map has one: “Turn left onto King Street” rather than “turn left in 200 metres”. Where a road has no name in the data, you get the manoeuvre without one.

Roundabouts are given as a single instruction with a counted exit — “take the 2nd exit” — counted by the roads leaving the circle, which is how a driver counts them.

Voice prompts

Prompts are spoken as you approach each turn, and they are timed rather than fixed: at highway speed the first warning comes about two kilometres out, on a town street a few hundred metres. You typically hear a turn called up to four times — a long warning, a medium one, a short one, and the turn itself at about 50 metres, where the distance is dropped and it is simply “Turn left onto King Street”.

Each prompt is spoken once. Joining a leg part way through does not replay the warnings you already missed.

Nothing is spoken while you are off the route, because the next instruction is for a road you are not on. Prompts resume on the new route.

Muting

The speaker button in the banner mutes and unmutes the voice, and it takes effect immediately — mid-sentence if need be. If the voice has gone quiet when you did not ask it to, work through the list in Troubleshooting.

The follow camera

While navigating, the map follows you and turns so that your direction of travel is up. Pan or zoom and it stops following, so you can look ahead down the route without fighting the map; the Re-centre button in the corner puts it back.

The pin and route line stay drawn either way.

Leaving the route

The app watches your position against the route and only decides you have left it after several consecutive fixes are clearly off — roughly thirty metres or more, and further when your GPS accuracy is poor. One bad fix in a parking garage does not trigger it. It also notices the honest case of a missed turn: an offset that is growing while you drive away from the route counts sooner than one that is merely noisy.

When you have left it, the route is recalculated from where you actually are, in the background, and the banner shows Rerouting… until the new route is ready — usually a second or two. Your avoidance settings are kept: if you asked to avoid ferries before the wrong turn, you still are.

Rerouting is rate-limited, so a stretch of road running parallel to the route does not have it recalculating on every fix.

When GPS is poor

Under heavy tree cover, in a valley, or in the first minute after a cold start with no network to help, fixes can be slow or coarse. Symptoms are a dot that lags, a distance that jumps, or a reroute that felt unnecessary.

What helps: start navigating while you can still see sky, keep the phone where it has a view out rather than in a bag or a glovebox, and give a cold start a minute before deciding something is wrong. More in Troubleshooting.

Safety

A map is not a windshield. Follow the signs, the lines and the conditions in front of you, and pull over if you need to look at the phone.

The map data comes from OpenStreetMap and can be incomplete or out of date: a seasonal road may be shown as an ordinary one, a restriction may be missing, a bridge may be gone. There is no low-bridge, weight or height avoidance today (planned), and no live traffic or closures. The terms of use set this out formally, and they are worth a minute before your first long drive.