Geo Tracker - GPS tracker

Review by eFreeware

Geo Tracker is a free GPS logging app for Android, developed by Ilya Bogdanovich and available since early 2013. Its purpose is simple to state: it records where you go, works out the numbers behind the trip, and lets you keep or share the result as a standard track file.

The reason to consider it is the combination of that narrow focus with a long list of statistics. It is not a social network for athletes. It is a recorder first, and the depth of what it calculates from a single outing is what makes it interesting.

It has been installed more than ten million times and holds a 4.5 average across 108,748 ratings, which suggests a large number of people have found the core job done well enough to keep it around.

Recording a route and reading it back

The basic loop is straightforward. You start tracking, the app logs your position over time, and when you stop you have a track you can look at on a map. While recording, the map can rotate automatically to follow your direction of travel, which the developer calls navigation mode and which makes more sense on a bike or in a car than on foot.

The map itself comes from OpenStreetMap or Google, and satellite imagery is available from Google or Mapbox. That choice matters if you walk or ride in places where the standard street view is thin on detail, because you can switch to imagery and see the terrain you are actually crossing.

Once a track is saved, you can mark points along it, look up a location from its coordinates, and add comments to a trip that can be viewed and searched later. The recent additions of per-waypoint emojis and direction arrows on tracks are small touches, but they suggest the app is being maintained rather than left as it was.

The numbers behind a trip

This is where Geo Tracker separates itself from a plain breadcrumb logger. It calculates distance and total recording time, maximum and average speed, and the time and average speed spent actually moving rather than stopped. That last distinction is the one that makes a ride or a hike comparable from one week to the next, because a long lunch break stops distorting the average.

Altitude gets similar treatment: minimum and maximum height, the difference between them, vertical distance covered, total ascent, and climbing speed. Slope is reported as minimum, maximum and average. For anyone planning a route in hills or mountains, those figures describe the effort involved far better than distance alone.

Speed and elevation are also plotted as charts, so you can see where a climb slowed you down rather than inferring it from a summary line. The whole set is more than most casual users will need, which is fine; the app does not force you to read all of it.

Files, maps and where your tracks live

Tracks can be exported as GPX, KML or KMZ files, which means they can be opened in other mapping and analysis software, including Google Earth and Ozi Explorer. The same formats work in the other direction: you can load a route someone else has recorded and follow it, which is useful for an unfamiliar trail or a ride you have been given rather than planned yourself.

Recorded tracks stay on the device and are not uploaded to any server. That is a meaningful difference from services that treat your routes as content for a community feed.

Map areas you have viewed are cached on the phone and remain available offline for a while, with the developer noting this works best for OpenStreetMap and Mapbox satellite imagery. Recording and calculating statistics need only a GPS signal; the internet connection is for fetching map images.

What it asks of you and your phone

The main practical consideration is GPS reception. The developer's own guidance is to wait for a fix before starting, to keep a clear view of the sky, and to check that location services are on, that the phone's date, time and time zone are set automatically, and that airplane mode is off. Buildings, forests, weather and satellite positions all affect how quickly and how accurately a track is captured, and none of that is something the app can fix.

Background recording is supported, and on many devices it needs additional system configuration; the instructions for that are inside the app. The developer says power use in the background has been optimized so that a typical phone charge lasts a full day of recording, and there is an economy mode in the settings if you want to push further. Those are claims about battery life rather than guarantees, and how a given phone behaves will vary.

The app is free and carries no ads. In-app purchases exist in the form of a voluntary donation to support development, so there is nothing to buy in order to use the features described. That is an unusual arrangement and worth noting.

Suited to hikers, riders and anyone retracing a route

The people who will get the most from Geo Tracker are those who go out and want a factual record afterward: hikers, mountain bikers, trail runners, skiers, motorcyclists and drivers on long or unfamiliar roads. The altitude, ascent and slope figures are aimed at terrain that changes, and the file exports are aimed at people who want to do something with the track later.

It also fits anyone who wants to follow a route they did not plan, whether that is a GPX file from a friend or a path downloaded from elsewhere. Being able to mark points of interest along the way and find a spot from its coordinates covers the practical side of navigating without a fixed destination.

What it is not built around is the social side of fitness tracking. Sharing means exporting a file or posting a screenshot of your stats. If comparing your pace with other people is the point of tracking for you, a different style of app will serve you better.

A dependable recorder for people who want the data

Geo Tracker does one job and does it thoroughly. It records a route, turns it into a set of statistics that hold up to scrutiny, and hands you a file in a format that other mapping tools understand. The absence of ads and the way tracks are kept on the device make it easy to recommend on principle as well as on features.

The trade-offs are the ones that come with any GPS logger. Reception depends on where you are and how your phone is configured, background recording may need setup on some devices, and the statistics are more than a casual user will ever look at. None of that is a fault in the app so much as the nature of the task.

For hikers, cyclists, drivers and anyone who wants a private, portable record of where they have been, this is a well-established option. Install it if you want the numbers and the files; the people who will be happiest with it are those who treat a track as data rather than as a post.

What's new in version 5.6.2

- Waypoint emojis — pick a custom emoji per waypoint, shown right on the map. - Directional arrows on tracks — show direction of travel (only with OSM/Mapbox maps). - App language — change it right inside the app. - Trip comments — add, view and search. - Lower battery use and smoother performance.