My Location - Track GPS & Maps

Review by eFreeware

If you travel often and want to remember the places you pass through, My Location is built for that job. It is a free Android app from Andev, sitting in the Maps & Navigation category, and its pitch is simple: find a spot on the map, save it, and come back to it later without juggling screenshots or half-remembered street names. More than 10 million installs and a 4.3 average from over 69,000 ratings suggest plenty of people have found a use for it.

The core of the app is a bookmark system. The developer says you can save any location with two clicks, and each saved place can carry a destination type plus a title and description of your own. That last part matters more than it sounds: a pin labeled with what it is and why you kept it is far more useful months later than a bare dot on a map.

Around that core sits a set of tools that overlap in sensible ways. You can see your current GPS position on the map, check the latitude and longitude, and read the address and street you are standing on. Live sharing passes your position to friends and family, and route tracking records the paths you take so you can look back at saved tracks. Directions cover walking, cycling and driving, and nearby search surfaces cafes, businesses, malls and other places around you.

Building a map of your own places

The bookmark feature is where I would expect most people to spend their time. Saving a location takes a couple of clicks, and the app lets you tag what kind of destination it is and attach a description or title. That turns a plain list of pins into something closer to a personal catalog: the viewpoint with the good sunrise, the parking lot that actually has spaces, the restaurant a friend mentioned.

Nearby search complements this. Rather than hunting for a place by name, you can look at what is around you, whether that is a cafe, a business or a mall, and save it if it seems worth returning to. Address and place search works the other way, letting you look up a specific street or named spot when you already know what you want.

What I like about the design is that saving and finding feed each other. You discover something through search or by looking at the map, keep it, and the next time you are in that area it is already there. For someone who moves between cities or returns to the same spots seasonally, that is a quietly useful loop.

File formats for people with existing data

The app handles KML, GPX and GEOJSON files, which is the detail that separates it from a basic pin-dropper. You can export the locations you have saved, and you can import files in any of those three formats.

GPX in particular is the format hikers and cyclists tend to accumulate, so the fit with planning a hike or bike route is obvious. The developer mentions exactly that use case, and the import and export support makes it credible rather than decorative. I would treat this as the feature that matters most for anyone arriving with a folder of existing tracks.

It also works in the other direction. Exporting means the places you collect here are not locked to the app, which is a reasonable thing to want from a tool you may use for years.

Tracking where you have been

Location tracking records the routes you take, and the app keeps those as saved tracks you can review later. That is a different job from saving a destination: it is about the journey rather than the endpoint, and it suits anyone curious about the paths they actually walk or ride rather than the ones they assume they take.

Live location sharing sits alongside this. You can share where you are with friends and family, either your current position or another location picked from the map. For a group splitting up in an unfamiliar city, or for family keeping an eye on someone traveling alone, that is the kind of feature that matters.

Directions round out the navigation side. The app routes you by walking, cycling or driving, and the developer describes the routes as the shortest and most accurate available, which is the sort of claim every navigation app makes and worth taking as marketing rather than a measured result.

Two home-screen widgets cut down on the fiddling. One starts navigation to a saved place such as home or work with a single tap, and the other saves your current location the same way. If you mostly use the app for the same few destinations, the widget is likely to be what you actually touch day to day.

Starting out and what you need

The app is quick to get into. You install the app and the map is there. There is a how-to-use page and a set of tutorial videos covering saving places and changing the map style, which is a sensible place to look if the controls are not immediately obvious.

The app is free to download and supported by ads, with in-app purchases also available.

A beta program also lets people try features early. It suits adventurous travelers, the sort of person who enjoys poking at unfinished builds.

Appearance and how the map reads

Map themes go beyond the default look. Retro and dark options are available, and a night mode makes the map easier to read after dark. The developer links to a short video showing how to switch styles, which suggests it is a setting worth knowing about rather than something you stumble into.

This is a small thing, but it affects how much you enjoy using a map on a regular basis. A dark map at night is easier on the eyes, and a retro style gives the whole thing a different character.

Who gets the most from it

The app suits people who move around and want a record of it. Travelers who want to feel like locals rather than tourists, hikers and cyclists planning routes, and anyone who regularly returns to the same handful of places will all find the bookmarking, tracking and sharing tools doing real work.

It also fits people who already have location data in KML, GPX or GEOJSON files. The import and export support means those files have somewhere to live, and the app becomes a viewer and organizer as much as a recorder.

For someone who only ever needs turn-by-turn guidance between two points and nothing else, the extra machinery here is more than the job requires. The app is built around collecting and keeping places, and that is where its value sits.

A keeper for travelers who collect places

My Location covers a lot of ground for a free app: saving tagged places, importing and exporting standard geo files, tracking routes, sharing live location, showing your current address and coordinates, and offering widgets for the spots you use most. The 4.3 average across more than 69,000 ratings suggests it has held up for a large audience since its 2014 release.

The trade-offs are the usual ones for a free app, and the route-quality claim is the developer's own. Neither is a reason to avoid it, but they are worth knowing before you commit your places to it.

I would point this at travelers, hikers, cyclists and anyone who wants their saved spots and recorded tracks in one place. If that describes the way you move through the world, it is an easy install.