SityTrail hiking trail GPS

★★★★★ Best hiking, biking app for France I have been using this for some weeks. You download the IGN hiking maps you need for the region you are hiking, cycling etc. Then you can use them off-line. Choose your region then select the hike you want from the many uploaded. Start your hike and your progress is tracked. Go off course and you are warned. Tech support is prompt and helpful in French and English.

★★★★★ Well worth trying for a month. Installed app then subscribed for IGN maps for a month (something like €5). Spent a bit of time downloading maps of relevant bits of France, at range of scales, then used them when on holiday. Well worth the time and effort.

★★☆☆☆ Very useful app, but a couple major annoyances For €15/year I'm surprised that Geolives doesn't have a reliable content delivery system. I struggled with slow speeds - downloading 81Mb (15 km offline maps) took between 1-1.5 hours - average download speed between multiple tries is about 15 KB/s!!!! Even scrolling around on the map takes about 10 seconds for the few visible tiles to be loaded. Normally the above would be OK if left to run overnight; however they have an annoying alarm that keeps ringing once the download is done... woke everyone up!

★★☆☆☆ Account details are a mess When this used to be called Geolives, although the mapping component worked brilliantly with IGN maps, the whole subscription and account management service was very confusing, and it wasn't clear which company you were dealing with, and the website was quite muddled up and inconsistent. Unfortunately this has recently got worse now that the product appears to have changed its name to 'SYTRAL' (even though it's primarily for use outside of cities ?!) and the Android App account doesn't mirror the web based account. There doesn't appear to be any configuration of this App. As soon as it opens it's stating that I have no subscription despite me having paid for one via the phone App (my PayPal account confirms that I've paid GeoLives !). Not surprisingly if I view my account via the web it doesn't recognize that I've made payment either. Overall, this is a bit of a mess, which is a shame as the Geoportail service is class leading and turns a decent phone like an S2 into a very useable sports GPS device. I might update this message if the developers improve things a bit - they can start by telling me where my PayPal payment has gone !