HERE Maps by Nokia had offline maps, including search & navigation, over a decade ago. At the time Google had only offline maps with tiles and some POIs, no navigation or similar things.

i loved the HERE Maps when i had a Windows Phone. we navigated two countries in Europe without ever needing to turn on data roaming. this was back in 2013 i think? it was mind-blowingly good to navigate from one end of the country to the other end using just offline maps.

Here Maps is still available on iOS and Android with offline maps. Owned by an EU auto consortium and well maintained.

Well, not if you like your maps to have Japan in them, since it doesn't.

Blocked by Japanese government? https://old.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/2s5p80/where_...

There might be such regulations, but they're much less strict than South Korea if so.

Yeah but navigation requires internet.

I drove through Death Valley and thought I was super smart by pre-downloading the whole area…

It does not. You can navigate perfectly fine fully offline. In your case either the maps weren't downloaded correctly, or the phone was reporting that it had internet connectivity so the app was trying to use it over the offline cache. Putting it in airplane mode may have fixed it.

I don’t even have a data plan on my phone so I can definitely say that navigation works just fine when offline!

Not if the entire area is within the downloaded map. I've been using google maps this way for a while now since I live in a rural area without solid coverage.

Maybe because the drive was long (Vegas to Bakersfield) and covered multiple downloaded areas?

I had to break it up into two legs to do a similar route (first to Lake Isabella then to Bakersfield)

that's not true. it can navigate without internet as long as you have downloaded the maps ahead of time. i have definitely used it in a few parks including Death valley NP and it worked fine. maybe your download got corrupted somehow or expired?

Microsoft maps (prior to even Bing, I forget the official name) had downloaded maps back in 2007 on Windows Mobile 6.1.

Apple is a bit late to the game here, but obviously this isn't a make it or break it feature for the success of a mobile platform!

I tried that at the time, I did plan for this eventuality in Nov 2020, but I remember that this didn’t work for that area. I forget why, but I was also trying to route towards gas stations since we were taking the scenic route and the stations were much further apart than I had expected. I also had a ham radio, but no programmed frequencies. It was like time traveling to the 1990’s except I had XM radio

Paper maps have had this for centuries.

People are downvoting this, but it's true. Unfortunately they often were lacking major continents.

And now Apple Maps will have it, yay!