Not all travel has to be to wilderness, there's just as much enjoyment to be had in visiting regular places, not just middle if nowhere kind of places. They might be boring to you, but that's a very narrow kind of thinking to assume that of others.

And unless you're spelunking, there's a very good chance that GPS is available. It's designed for the military, so reliability and accessibility are important. There are very few places on the earth that cannot see enough satellites to get a decent fix.

Not all developed countries are boring! It's just as much of a jungle in NYC as it is in any South American rain forest.

Now you know me.

Incidentally, I spend an awful lot of my year traveling in places where my phone wouldn't get any signal, were I to switch it on. I think this app would work a lot better for somebody backpacking around Europe than banana boating down the Amazon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS

The former may be the exact people the makers are targeting. For instance, my parents usually go on 'package tours' where a travel company takes them around in a group; usually its to Europe, AU etc.

On another level, it's even useful for finding the parts of a city you've never seen before. I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life, and have begun to find it very boring, but perhaps if I were to unlock parts of the city that I didn't realize I'd never been to before, I could make some interesting new discoveries and keep myself entertained without even having to travel!

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/06/go-offline-with-g...

It's a life saver if you're traveling through middles of nowhere.

For example — this summer, I was travelling between Skopje and Belgrade. After hitch hiking the whole day to Skopje, my phone was dead. I only had 30 minutes in the train station to charge my phone, and electricity was not available on the train.

By the time I got to Belgrade in the morning, my phone was dead again, and charging it would have meant hunting down a cafe with outlets and wasting two hours waiting for it to charge.

At that point, it was easier to just ask people where stuff was than screw around with my phone to get maps working.

"Passive location" apps like this just add to that stress, because it's just draining your battery faster for marginal benefit. "Be a painkiller, not a vitamin" and all that.

I think there's a huge opportunity in web-connected paper maps for relieving travel stress. I know that's what I needed this summer.

I hope they've been judicious in their use of power while in the background. It seems like a cool idea to me. I can easily imagine simply trying to fill in the area I live in much the same way as I would explore nooks and crannies in dungeons maps.

Or just switch their phones off, unless they need help, if you are lucky enough to have reception. The "off-the-beaten-track" types that I know use paper maps, or a Garmin GPS that lasts two days while continually using maps on two AA batteries, that can handle occasional drops and water.

I like hiking every now and then, but do not really see use for this. What does it give me over uploading my tracks on the many 'show my last hike track' websites?

Besides that, I can really see this being harmful for nature, people destroying vulnerable plants and animals just to remove a particular piece of fog. It's as sad as people completely 'flattening' a some spot to find a particular Geocache.

(I do like responsible Geocaching, but people should be made aware of damage that they could make.)

And if you're talking about the Internet at all, that's not the point of serious backpacking, hiking, etc, that's your point.

For example, João Garcia, who reached the top of all the 14 highest mountains in the world (Everest, K2, Annapurna, etc) without an oxygen bottle, had an internet-connected GPS logger with him - a system which also happens to have an iOS app. Was he not "seriously hiking" because of that?

You want this:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ulmon.andr...