It’s a real shame that Instamapper is closing in December. If you don’t know, the service allows you to send GPS beacons and track your location. I’ve used it on many cycle rides and it’s normally the first app I use if I want to track my route. I also use it to share my cycling trips to the Social Hiking website which needs to be able to read GPS data from a third party website in order to display routes/tracks together with associated media (tweets, images etc).
I think the main reasons I’ve used Instamapper are that it is reliable and their GPS Tracker Android app does not seem to consume as much battery as other apps. Admittedly, I’ve not tested the battery usage as thoroughly as I might but it just feels less power hungry to me.
Along with many other people, I’d happily pay to use InstaMapper (it is/was a free service) but it seems that moving to a paid service is not an option because that in itself will increase InstaMapper’s costs (map fees, greater support required etc).
So, what’s next for my cycle rides? Well, if I want to show my trips on Social Hiking I’ll need to move back to using Viewranger which is the other Android GPS tracking app that is supported. I wrote a review of Viewranger as one of the first posts on this site and I like the app. However, when I used it last time, there was a problem with the app exiting/closing unexpectedly in the middle of several rides. When cycling, it’s often impossible to notice that your app has shut down unexpectedly until you have covered a significant distance – which completely ruins the whole sharing-my-route thing – so it’s essential that the app is 100% reliable. Still, that was some time ago so I’m looking forward to using the Viewranger app again in its more recent version.
Other options include apps like Endomondo (which I’ve used) and Strava, RunKeeper etc. My experience with Endomondo is that it’s a great app but the GPS data cannot be shared live with Social Hiking; it’s possible to export and share the data afterwards but ‘live’ is the key thing for Social Hiking.
I’ll also be trying several other GPS tracking Android apps as well in coming months and will report back. If you have any suggestions from your own experiences, leave a comment – thanks!
Good news! I’m remaking insta-mapper! Join the forum! would be good to get feedback from previous customers! we want to make it better then before! and keep it free!
http://www.insta-mapper.com/Forum
Sounds great! I’ll keep in touch with the forum. Thanks!
Hi Clive! we would love it if you just create a blog page for us, we are needing to get insta-mapper back on google and a short blog and link to our site would help us greatly!!
http://www.insta-mapper.com
I will write a blog post when I’ve used the new version. Hope that’s OK
Check out GPS Tracker Ultimate – Coooeee
Coooeee has more features than any other app on the market and is free for basic use. As well as tracking friends & family, using their devices with Coooeee installed, it can also track personal GPS Trackers. Coooeee currently supports the TK10x range but can easily be extended to support any tracker that is configurable to send its data to our servers. There is a small cost for using your own tracker with Coooeee of just £10 for 3 months, which is far less than any other competitor. With Coooeee you can easily create, update, remove zones. You can even apply zones to all friends & family, individuals or groups. It is a very full featured app. Currently it is available for Android and will soon be available on iPhone.
Hi Clive! are you IOS or Android?
We have just released our Android version now on the app store (I dropped you a mail directly).
We would love your feedback.
Cheers