I have hiked plenty with basic, free gps apps with pre-downloaded maps plenty times. While manually disabling phone signal for conserving battery. Never had an

I have hiked plenty with basic, free gps apps with pre-downloaded maps plenty times. While manually disabling phone signal for conserving battery. Never had an issue. It is really really simple actually. The person in question was totally unprepared. One should never assume that they are going to have signal in the wilderness and they should definitely not depend on that to navigate themselves while hiking.