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Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

79 points by jojule 4y ago

jojule 4y ago
Lack of offline maps are a showstopper for using the new Apple Watch Ultra for multi-day hiking. This post tests the only workaround against Garmin Fenix.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Here's a counterpoint. If I actually want to look at a map, I look at my phone or a paper map. I find squinting at a map on a watch way too small to be useful. The apps I've used on both Garmins and the Apple Watch have a map screen that I basically never use.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  It's only a showstopper for using it for multi-day hiking with no other map system. The watch still has many helpful features outside of being your exclusive postage-stamp-sized map system.
zeristor 4y ago
Work Outdoors is an amazing app for logging hikes and showing allowing me to glance down and see a OSM map of where I had walked, lovely little Apple Watch app.
skunkworker 4y ago
Hopefully other apps like AllTrails will support offline maps eventually. It honestly surprised me that they didn’t
- hakcermani 4y ago
  thought Alltrails does ! its not automatic, but one can download for select routes .. oh must be a paid feature ..
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    I like Alltrails but their Watch app certainly seems dependent on their phone app. If you open it without your phone nearby, it will just say "Waiting for the AllTrails App" or something similar.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  really wish Hiking Project did, as that's what we usually use for finding trails, with CalTopo for backcountry / backpacking stuff.
- jojule 4y ago
  I think that the iOS built-in map component does not support offline vector maps. Most apps (with exception of WorkOutDoors) use that and cannot support improper offline without Apple updating the component.
jojule 4y ago
Offline map situation on Ultra is complicated. WorkOutDoors + Garmin Explore combination is a decent workaround, but nowhere as robust as Garmin Fenix. Various details may make the workaround no-go for you: do you have access to the Garmin Explore app, is having only a small map acceptable for you, is the battery life sufficient for you, is routing on watch a must have for you, …
exabrial 4y ago
Just buy a Garmin if you want to do anything -useful- with your watch for sports or outdoors. Apple is 5-10 years behind their reliability or battery life. And if you’re going somewhere without a cell signal… or god forbid, you don’t have (shudder) wifi, it’ll tick right along. Not to mention they don’t sunset their products after 12 months… your watch will get updates for a long time. They’re also -very- repairable to boot.
- greggsy 4y ago
  Sure they’re 5-10 years behind, but I wouldn’t underestimate Apple’s ability to create a thriving ecosystem. Any Garmin app developers worth their salt should be scrambling to port their existing apps to the Apple Watch platform. It’s currently an under-supplied market, and failing to tap into that opportunity is a bad business strategy. Totally agree re: the current state of repairability and support, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they extend the user repair program to this sector. Also, it’s a bit disingenuous to claim that they sunset their products after 12 months. They might refresh them, but that doesn’t change the software support cycle.
  - exabrial 4y ago
    Not at all, Garmin is not fashionware like Apple. You buy Garmin because you are an athlete that needs an actual complete product that is tested and bullet proof; where you own the hardware, and you’re not ‘renting’ it from Apple. If you want to flash how fancy you are to your coworkers and have a second iPhone, you buy the iwatch. Apple does not hold a candle to Garmin’s software for sports and training… they have everything from an actual desktop app that works (gasp) without an internet connection, an online portal where you can freely download all of YOUR data (gasp) if you choose the connected option, and the sports and training analytics is light years ahead of Apple. And besides, Apple can’t receive ANT+ signals from connected sensors, and BLE battery life is abysmal in comparison. The only thing Apple has on Garmin is the have app stores full on apps, but that’s it. Nobody is using their Garmin to play Candy Crush but that misses the point.
    - 4y ago
qualifiedai 4y ago
I love my Garmin Fenix 7 watch. Built in surf session tracking is superb. Lots of other cool features, solar charging and over a week of battery for my use. I ditched my Apple watch for it. Having said that, one dangerous area where Garmin is missing a boat is their Garmin IQ store - that ecosystem is basically dead with very few useful apps.
- MrMetlHed 4y ago
  Yeah, this is my only complaint about my Fenix 6. Total lack of any kind of app ecosystem. I don't even know how they'd manage to create one without some sort of open standard for delivering richer notifications to watches or something. It's a bummer.
  - prescriptivist 4y ago
    Doesn't help that you have to write apps in their proprietary language.
- ip26 4y ago
  One one hand i absolutely agree. But on the other, has anybody, Apple included, figured out any terribly useful apps for a watch that doesn’t already come built in or partner with a phone?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Well, at least pre-Ultra, Apple was rather deficient in outdoor activity apps including hiking. But that may now be moot with the Ultra. (And the Ultra probably explains Apple's benign neglect of this area prior.)
arwhatever 4y ago
Hopefully it works better than podcasts on iOS when you go out of your way to download your content in advance for offline consumption.
trafficante 4y ago
I’ve been hanging on to my Series 3 for years now waiting on a watch refresh that brings another useful sensor or expands the screen large enough to make the watch usable for at least viewing Twitter-size content. Along comes the Ultra with a massive footprint and a temperature sensor (albeit one only useful for monitoring averages). My time has finally arrived. And then it turns out that the usable screen size is essentially a rounding error compared to the Series 7 and the temp sensor is limited to reproductive tracking (guessing this is a regulatory thing). Ah well, maybe next year.
- macintux 4y ago
  Gruber assesses the size difference more positively. https://daringfireball.net/2022/09/apple_watch_ultra https://daringfireball.net/2022/09/apple_watch_ultra
  - trafficante 4y ago
    Huh, I didn’t know about the sleep tracking being able to record wrist temp. That’s something at least. I suppose I’ll have to see it in person, but the pixel jump between the Ultra and the 7 is sub-2% while the jump between 6-7 was 16-17% iirc. I also read a worrying mini-review comment on 9to5Mac from an Ultra owner that some of the watch faces are somehow displaying SMALLER than on the poster’s 7. Can’t direct link the comment so I quoted the relevant snippet below. Obv I’m taking it with a grain of salt until I see confirmation but it would be an odd thing to lie about so specifically. “Face on Metropolitan is indeed smaller on the Ultra. 28mm diameter on Ultra, 29mm on 45mm Series 7!”
seanp2k2 4y ago
Fenix 5 owner here who recently upgraded to the Ultra. For daily stuff and "normal" workouts, it's way more useful. I get alerts from my cameras with useable images when they detect faces around our house, for example. I can do useful things like watch my grill temp + probe temp from the watch. The face customization experience is a LOT better than the Fenix. It feels like an entirely different class of device with the responsive touchscreen and bright screen that refreshes quickly. The Fenix feels like a souped-up version of the Timex Ironman Triathlon watch I had in the 90s (with Timex Datalink to sync data with a PC via CRT flashes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink ). As far as which I'd take backpacking: neither. The Fenix isn't a better UX than our iPhones, and we already take battery backups for the phones + put them on airplane mode with low brightness and get ~2-4 days of battery life out of them that way (usually shutting them down completely at night). The watches aren't worth the grams yet -- it's weight I'd rather spend on a nice phone pocket for my backpack (I like the Prometheus Design Werx SPX Pouch). I'm hopeful that another year of software updates for the Ultra might fix that -- if it did have useable topo maps + dynamic offline route planning, it might be worth it. The other big benefit I see is cellular. Now, when I go for a run / bike ride / etc I don't actually need my phone, and if I'm confident that I might stop somewhere with Apple Pay, I might not need my wallet either. Back when I was riding pretty seriously, it was common for folks to just bring their ID and some cash. I'm also excited about the prospect of using the watch as a fully-featured bike computer, given it's about the exact same size as the old Polar bike computers I used to love.
- exabrial 4y ago
  Your Garmin had an option to load a credit card and tap-pay, no Ultra needed.
  - teruakohatu 4y ago
    In my country, New Zealand, Garmin pay only supports cards from one bank and about five random credit cards issued by stores and consumer credit firms. It is exceptionally disappointing.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
The elevation profile of a planned hike really is the one thing I miss from WorkOutDoors. Too often do I look at my iPhone to see where exactly I’m at in the climb.
jrnichols 4y ago
Even though I've only had it since Friday morning, I love the Ultra so far and see a lot of potential for it. I think that there's a big enough market where the Garmin devices and the Apple Watch Ultra will both coexist and fill their own niches. I'm looking forward to what we see on the Ultra here in the future. this was a fun article and I love seeing users already working on this.
nharada 4y ago
Comments in this thread are fairly dismissive of the Ultra as a serious competitor for Garmin's high end sport watches, and this article seems like an example of it not stacking up. But if I was Garmin I'd be terrified of Apple coming into the space. I was at Fitbit when the first Apple watch came out, and we laughed at how inferior it was to many of our products for the first several releases. Then around series 3 we started saying things like "actually it would be really nice if we had this too", and now (series 8) they're clearly the smartwatch leader in most dimensions. I hope Garmin can remain competitive in this space, but Apple's massive resources and the long term strategy that enables is very hard to compete with.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Yes in the future maybe Apple will eat Garmin's cake and lunch. But for now its just a shiny not-so-useful gimmick compared to Garmin's. I bought my wife same Garmin as author compares to, I have few friends who are deep into drinking Apple's cool-aid... and its uncomparable device for outdoors. One is jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, the other possibly the best civilian gadget for map-on-wrist hiking (apart from 7 series which are way too expensive but stack up on that shininess better). Plus lets not forget a very important point skimmed in article, where Apple fails even if rest would be comparable - miserable battery life. The topic is about going to wilderness, and gadget desperately needing recharging much more often is simply vastly inferior to one needing less. Also they seem much less rugged, which is pretty bad for outdoors where you bang watches against trees and rock frequently. So situation for outdoors is unlike in phones segment, where on most fronts (but far from all) when you pay Apple money you get a very decent and capable phone. In watches you get just OK watches within their segment (compared to products from Xiaomi, Samsung etc.)
- Woeps 4y ago
  Meh.... 18 hours vs 18 days of battery life and an ridiculous price gap. I think that's all that needs to be said.
  - simonh 4y ago
    I hope Garmin don't think that way, or they're toast. Fortunately it looks like they have an advantage in enough areas they should be ok for now.
buro9 4y ago
I'm clearly an outlier... But a Casio for a watch, and then an old Garmin bike computer with OSM maps has proven the best for hiking. Large screen, incredible battery life, and OSM maps when off road just beat everything except Ordnance Survey in the UK. I do have a Fenix 5, but it's not very good TBH. I did try an older Apple watch and similarly not very good. I thought about Suunto but they seemed more watersports oriented. The best of the outdoor devices I have has no hiking features. That's my Hammerhead bike computer. The software is great, the maps are OSM, the hardware is great. If that came with a neck collar loop and a hiking profile it would be my single device for outdoor things.
durnygbur 4y ago
European smartphones (Nokia) in 2010: "here are offline maps of the entire developed world free of charge". Americans in 2022: "offline maps - yay or nay?".
theklr 4y ago
I get what they’re going for but apple made it clear with two things he’s not the target audience (yet): - cellular only (first in this space that no one speaks of with this battery capacity) - them catering to planners/trainers in their adversing. Sure Apple is pricey and they don’t make for everyone, but no one markets with bullseyes like Apple in tech. I hope Garmin truly welcomes the competition. It’s getting sad and I would love pressure on Apple to really continue attempting to push the space of wearables and not get idle from being on a market island

79 points by jojule 4y ago

Lack of offline maps are a showstopper for using the new Apple Watch Ultra for multi-day hiking. This post tests the only workaround against Garmin Fenix.

ghaff 4y ago
Here's a counterpoint. If I actually want to look at a map, I look at my phone or a paper map. I find squinting at a map on a watch way too small to be useful. The apps I've used on both Garmins and the Apple Watch have a map screen that I basically never use.
D13Fd 4y ago
It's only a showstopper for using it for multi-day hiking with no other map system. The watch still has many helpful features outside of being your exclusive postage-stamp-sized map system.

zeristor 4y ago

Work Outdoors is an amazing app for logging hikes and showing allowing me to glance down and see a OSM map of where I had walked, lovely little Apple Watch app.

skunkworker 4y ago

Hopefully other apps like AllTrails will support offline maps eventually. It honestly surprised me that they didn’t

hakcermani 4y ago
thought Alltrails does ! its not automatic, but one can download for select routes .. oh must be a paid feature ..
- D13Fd 4y ago
  I like Alltrails but their Watch app certainly seems dependent on their phone app. If you open it without your phone nearby, it will just say "Waiting for the AllTrails App" or something similar.
seanp2k2 4y ago
really wish Hiking Project did, as that's what we usually use for finding trails, with CalTopo for backcountry / backpacking stuff.
jojule 4y ago
I think that the iOS built-in map component does not support offline vector maps. Most apps (with exception of WorkOutDoors) use that and cannot support improper offline without Apple updating the component.

jojule 4y ago

Offline map situation on Ultra is complicated. WorkOutDoors + Garmin Explore combination is a decent workaround, but nowhere as robust as Garmin Fenix. Various details may make the workaround no-go for you: do you have access to the Garmin Explore app, is having only a small map acceptable for you, is the battery life sufficient for you, is routing on watch a must have for you, …

exabrial 4y ago

Just buy a Garmin if you want to do anything -useful- with your watch for sports or outdoors. Apple is 5-10 years behind their reliability or battery life. And if you’re going somewhere without a cell signal… or god forbid, you don’t have (shudder) wifi, it’ll tick right along. Not to mention they don’t sunset their products after 12 months… your watch will get updates for a long time. They’re also -very- repairable to boot.

greggsy 4y ago
Sure they’re 5-10 years behind, but I wouldn’t underestimate Apple’s ability to create a thriving ecosystem. Any Garmin app developers worth their salt should be scrambling to port their existing apps to the Apple Watch platform. It’s currently an under-supplied market, and failing to tap into that opportunity is a bad business strategy. Totally agree re: the current state of repairability and support, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they extend the user repair program to this sector. Also, it’s a bit disingenuous to claim that they sunset their products after 12 months. They might refresh them, but that doesn’t change the software support cycle.
- exabrial 4y ago
  Not at all, Garmin is not fashionware like Apple. You buy Garmin because you are an athlete that needs an actual complete product that is tested and bullet proof; where you own the hardware, and you’re not ‘renting’ it from Apple. If you want to flash how fancy you are to your coworkers and have a second iPhone, you buy the iwatch. Apple does not hold a candle to Garmin’s software for sports and training… they have everything from an actual desktop app that works (gasp) without an internet connection, an online portal where you can freely download all of YOUR data (gasp) if you choose the connected option, and the sports and training analytics is light years ahead of Apple. And besides, Apple can’t receive ANT+ signals from connected sensors, and BLE battery life is abysmal in comparison. The only thing Apple has on Garmin is the have app stores full on apps, but that’s it. Nobody is using their Garmin to play Candy Crush but that misses the point.
  - 4y ago

qualifiedai 4y ago

I love my Garmin Fenix 7 watch. Built in surf session tracking is superb. Lots of other cool features, solar charging and over a week of battery for my use. I ditched my Apple watch for it. Having said that, one dangerous area where Garmin is missing a boat is their Garmin IQ store - that ecosystem is basically dead with very few useful apps.

MrMetlHed 4y ago
Yeah, this is my only complaint about my Fenix 6. Total lack of any kind of app ecosystem. I don't even know how they'd manage to create one without some sort of open standard for delivering richer notifications to watches or something. It's a bummer.
- prescriptivist 4y ago
  Doesn't help that you have to write apps in their proprietary language.
ip26 4y ago
One one hand i absolutely agree. But on the other, has anybody, Apple included, figured out any terribly useful apps for a watch that doesn’t already come built in or partner with a phone?
- ghaff 4y ago
  Well, at least pre-Ultra, Apple was rather deficient in outdoor activity apps including hiking. But that may now be moot with the Ultra. (And the Ultra probably explains Apple's benign neglect of this area prior.)

arwhatever 4y ago

Hopefully it works better than podcasts on iOS when you go out of your way to download your content in advance for offline consumption.

trafficante 4y ago

I’ve been hanging on to my Series 3 for years now waiting on a watch refresh that brings another useful sensor or expands the screen large enough to make the watch usable for at least viewing Twitter-size content. Along comes the Ultra with a massive footprint and a temperature sensor (albeit one only useful for monitoring averages). My time has finally arrived. And then it turns out that the usable screen size is essentially a rounding error compared to the Series 7 and the temp sensor is limited to reproductive tracking (guessing this is a regulatory thing). Ah well, maybe next year.

macintux 4y ago
Gruber assesses the size difference more positively. https://daringfireball.net/2022/09/apple_watch_ultra https://daringfireball.net/2022/09/apple_watch_ultra
- trafficante 4y ago
  Huh, I didn’t know about the sleep tracking being able to record wrist temp. That’s something at least. I suppose I’ll have to see it in person, but the pixel jump between the Ultra and the 7 is sub-2% while the jump between 6-7 was 16-17% iirc. I also read a worrying mini-review comment on 9to5Mac from an Ultra owner that some of the watch faces are somehow displaying SMALLER than on the poster’s 7. Can’t direct link the comment so I quoted the relevant snippet below. Obv I’m taking it with a grain of salt until I see confirmation but it would be an odd thing to lie about so specifically. “Face on Metropolitan is indeed smaller on the Ultra. 28mm diameter on Ultra, 29mm on 45mm Series 7!”

seanp2k2 4y ago

Fenix 5 owner here who recently upgraded to the Ultra. For daily stuff and "normal" workouts, it's way more useful. I get alerts from my cameras with useable images when they detect faces around our house, for example. I can do useful things like watch my grill temp + probe temp from the watch. The face customization experience is a LOT better than the Fenix. It feels like an entirely different class of device with the responsive touchscreen and bright screen that refreshes quickly. The Fenix feels like a souped-up version of the Timex Ironman Triathlon watch I had in the 90s (with Timex Datalink to sync data with a PC via CRT flashes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink ). As far as which I'd take backpacking: neither. The Fenix isn't a better UX than our iPhones, and we already take battery backups for the phones + put them on airplane mode with low brightness and get ~2-4 days of battery life out of them that way (usually shutting them down completely at night). The watches aren't worth the grams yet -- it's weight I'd rather spend on a nice phone pocket for my backpack (I like the Prometheus Design Werx SPX Pouch). I'm hopeful that another year of software updates for the Ultra might fix that -- if it did have useable topo maps + dynamic offline route planning, it might be worth it. The other big benefit I see is cellular. Now, when I go for a run / bike ride / etc I don't actually need my phone, and if I'm confident that I might stop somewhere with Apple Pay, I might not need my wallet either. Back when I was riding pretty seriously, it was common for folks to just bring their ID and some cash. I'm also excited about the prospect of using the watch as a fully-featured bike computer, given it's about the exact same size as the old Polar bike computers I used to love.

exabrial 4y ago
Your Garmin had an option to load a credit card and tap-pay, no Ultra needed.
- teruakohatu 4y ago
  In my country, New Zealand, Garmin pay only supports cards from one bank and about five random credit cards issued by stores and consumer credit firms. It is exceptionally disappointing.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

The elevation profile of a planned hike really is the one thing I miss from WorkOutDoors. Too often do I look at my iPhone to see where exactly I’m at in the climb.

jrnichols 4y ago

Even though I've only had it since Friday morning, I love the Ultra so far and see a lot of potential for it. I think that there's a big enough market where the Garmin devices and the Apple Watch Ultra will both coexist and fill their own niches. I'm looking forward to what we see on the Ultra here in the future. this was a fun article and I love seeing users already working on this.

nharada 4y ago

Comments in this thread are fairly dismissive of the Ultra as a serious competitor for Garmin's high end sport watches, and this article seems like an example of it not stacking up. But if I was Garmin I'd be terrified of Apple coming into the space. I was at Fitbit when the first Apple watch came out, and we laughed at how inferior it was to many of our products for the first several releases. Then around series 3 we started saying things like "actually it would be really nice if we had this too", and now (series 8) they're clearly the smartwatch leader in most dimensions. I hope Garmin can remain competitive in this space, but Apple's massive resources and the long term strategy that enables is very hard to compete with.

saiya-jin 4y ago
Yes in the future maybe Apple will eat Garmin's cake and lunch. But for now its just a shiny not-so-useful gimmick compared to Garmin's. I bought my wife same Garmin as author compares to, I have few friends who are deep into drinking Apple's cool-aid... and its uncomparable device for outdoors. One is jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, the other possibly the best civilian gadget for map-on-wrist hiking (apart from 7 series which are way too expensive but stack up on that shininess better). Plus lets not forget a very important point skimmed in article, where Apple fails even if rest would be comparable - miserable battery life. The topic is about going to wilderness, and gadget desperately needing recharging much more often is simply vastly inferior to one needing less. Also they seem much less rugged, which is pretty bad for outdoors where you bang watches against trees and rock frequently. So situation for outdoors is unlike in phones segment, where on most fronts (but far from all) when you pay Apple money you get a very decent and capable phone. In watches you get just OK watches within their segment (compared to products from Xiaomi, Samsung etc.)
Woeps 4y ago
Meh.... 18 hours vs 18 days of battery life and an ridiculous price gap. I think that's all that needs to be said.
- simonh 4y ago
  I hope Garmin don't think that way, or they're toast. Fortunately it looks like they have an advantage in enough areas they should be ok for now.

buro9 4y ago

I'm clearly an outlier... But a Casio for a watch, and then an old Garmin bike computer with OSM maps has proven the best for hiking. Large screen, incredible battery life, and OSM maps when off road just beat everything except Ordnance Survey in the UK. I do have a Fenix 5, but it's not very good TBH. I did try an older Apple watch and similarly not very good. I thought about Suunto but they seemed more watersports oriented. The best of the outdoor devices I have has no hiking features. That's my Hammerhead bike computer. The software is great, the maps are OSM, the hardware is great. If that came with a neck collar loop and a hiking profile it would be my single device for outdoor things.

durnygbur 4y ago

European smartphones (Nokia) in 2010: "here are offline maps of the entire developed world free of charge". Americans in 2022: "offline maps - yay or nay?".

theklr 4y ago

I get what they’re going for but apple made it clear with two things he’s not the target audience (yet): - cellular only (first in this space that no one speaks of with this battery capacity) - them catering to planners/trainers in their adversing. Sure Apple is pricey and they don’t make for everyone, but no one markets with bullseyes like Apple in tech. I hope Garmin truly welcomes the competition. It’s getting sad and I would love pressure on Apple to really continue attempting to push the space of wearables and not get idle from being on a market island