OS Maps: Walk, Hike, Run, Bike

I travel to the UK every few years and love the OS maps app. It’s great for planning walks to historic sites in the countryside and the subscription price is very reasonable for a month at a time. I’m heading to the UK soon and I can’t upgrade to premium. My devices say I already have a subscription on my Apple ID, but I don’t. It asks me to log in with my apple account but there is no “log in with apple” option, only e-mail. So I deleted my account and created a new one with my Apple ID e-mail address and it still does the same thing. Apple doesn’t even show the expired subscription from the last time I went to the UK. I assume because I paid OS directly instead of through the Apple Store. Now when I try to manage my subscription from the web, the website just pushes me back to the app and I get the same “You already have a subscription with this device’s apple ID” error. Please add Apple ID login so this weird billing thing doesn’t come up any more, or bring back web-based subscription creation. Great great app, terrible subscription infrastructure :-( EDIT: I was able to renew by searching my e-mail for the subscription receipt from years ago, which had a “manage subscription” link there. That took me to the App Store and let me Resubscribe, even though the App Store wasn’t listing the expired subscription. Sounds like Apple made some changes to the App Store list of subscriptions that has broken your user experience for US subscribers.

When I originally installed the apps and upgraded to Premium, everything worked fine. I logged out, but could never log back in with my premium subscription, both on the website and on the smart devices. I was finally able to log back on to their website but only by changing my password, which is ridiculous. And when I used the new password on my iPhone and iPad, in both cases I received the message that an unexpected error had occurred. Technical support did their best to help but the issue remains unresolved. There’s another feature of the app that is very annoying (this was before all my technical issues). The screen has a window with the option to start navigation. I only wanted to look at the route, not navigate. Unfortunately this window takes up a significant part of the screen, blocking a large part of the map. For some unknown reason, you can not close this window, and tech help said that the app developers aren’t currently going to change it. All in all, it’s a great app when it worked for me, and most people don’t appear to have had the problems I’ve experienced. I hope that tech people read this and do some more development work.

If you’re going hiking in the UK and not taking this app on your smartphone then you are a fool. Definitely worth the cost of the premium version to get access to the detailed maps and offline maps. OS maps always had amazing accuracy and detail - now you can use gps on your phone to see exactly where you are among all that detail. Great for planning free form hikes to get you off the beaten path. Only thing the app can’t tell you is the condition of the trail or footpath you are going to hike on - huge clumps of stinging nettles are a real thing - but you can use the app to replay your hike on the fly to avoid whatever you encounter that you don’t want to deal with. All this for less than the cost of a single paper map - it’s a bargain!