Tracks4Africa Guide

Purchased this app for a 3-week self-drive safari around Botswana. This app was quite helpful—until you come to any intersections of multiple roads or twisty conflagrations, which is rather common while off-roading in Botswana. In this situations, it’s nearly useless! You have to drive for 5 or 10 minutes, then check again to see if you’ve guessed the right direction. This cost us several hours of being lost multiple times, getting stuck in messy off-road paths, sometimes in dangerous situations, getting dark, very isolated, animals about, and far from our campsite. This was stressful. I am far from a beginner with maps and traveling. The zoom just stops at a level way too high up. At about 1 cm to a mile! The blue dot-arrow with your position is some 200 m across. Why? It seems inexplicable. It was extremely frustrating. I though maybe I was doing something wrong, like I hadn’t unlocked some park of the app. But the app shows the switch for the guide green and good to go. We were very dependent on this app but could not rely on it.

It’s the best. All kinds of cool data for road trips.

The T4A Guide is NOT a navigation solution - there are lots of apps for that. Rather it brings a paper map experience to the digital world. It supplements a navigation app but does not replace it. Navigation apps are hopeless for planning routes and trips as well as for providing big picture orientation while on a journey. This is where the Guide excels. As you zoom out it will still show town names where navigation apps struggle. The v2 update makes a huge difference by introducing far more detailed maps.