The Official Geocaching App
When the App Store for the iPhone was launched about half a year ago, us Geocachers have been waiting to see how the technologies in the iPhone can be use for Geocaching and enhance that experience. After a lengthy wait with a few third party apps, finally Groundspeak, the people behind Geocaching.com, launched their official Geocaching App. This popped up in the store for a small price of $13.99 NZD ($9.99 USD). I didn’t hesitate to buy it because I thought it would be a worthwhile investment. After a few updates with bug fixes and a couple of extra features slotted in, here is where the Geocaching App currently stands.
When you launch the app for the first time, you are greeted with a terms notice which you have to accept. After this, everytime you will launch the app, it will search for your current location. For a lot of people, this is where your first issues with this app will show up. If you don’t have location services enabled, you will have 3 different popups get thrown at you to “okay” to. This happens everytime you launch the app, unless you enable location services. Otherwise, it will find your location and give you a search page where you can either manually enter a Postal Code, Address or GC code. This will show you the caches that meet the criteria, same as the results on the Geocaching.com website. You can also select search for nearby Geocaches. This takes your GPS co-ordinates and shows you the caches around where you are. If you don’t have an iPhone 3G, this feature is pretty useless to iPhone 2G and iPod Touch users. In the first version of the app, there was an issue with the search coming up with caches you’ve already found. They managed to get it to not show them in an update by entering your Geocaching.com login details into the app. The search is pretty solid and works great when looking for caches. The location services stuff is pretty useless on a non-iPhone 3G device, which is expected.
When you search for a cache, you are given a list of the caches that it finds (unless you enter the GC code.) In this page, it shows you the type of cache it is (traditional, multi etc.) and the direction and distance it is. It also shows the difficulty and terrain info as well as the cache size. When you select a cache, it shows all the same info as on the search results page along with the co-ordinates to the location. From here you can choose to save the cache info into a database, navigate to the place using the built in GPS of the iPhone 3G, or map it which launches Maps.app to pinpoint the location on Google Maps. On this page, you can get the description of the cache, 5 most recent logs, any travel bugs with the cache and the hint. This is all the information you would get from the Geocaching website for the cache, all accessible on the iPhone. If you do choose to save them, you see all the same information but without having to have a connection to the internet. This is very handy if you are going to a place without good mobile reception or you want to store all the cache information so you can access it easily.
Do I think it is worth the $13.99 I payed for it? To be honest, not really. The app isn’t very stable and crashes at random times and when trying to load some saved caches. This can be very frustrating when you are in the middle of nowhere and relying on the Geocaching app to give you all the information on the cache you are trying to acquire. Also if you don’t have an iPhone 3G, a lot of the features of this app are lost. The only useful feature for non-iPhone 3G devices is the ability to save caches onto the device, even then, this isn’t the most reliable app. Only get this app if you are a Geocacher with an iPhone 3G and willing to lay down $13.99 NZD (or $9.99 USD) on this app. It will definitely be a much better experience for you as the 3G was the device this app was mainly developed for. Maybe one day I will get to take this app out for a run with an iPhone 3G and the whole experience with this app will be much much better. Until then, I’d say this app is average at best.
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I have a 3G and I actually snagged this app for free “elsewhere” because for some reason I wasn’t having high hopes for it and wasn’t about to buy before I try. After seeing GeoCache navigator on my mom’s Blackberry, I can say anyone would have a hard time beating that app, thus my little faith. (Not to mention the accuracy of the GPS on the blackberry, something the 3G is lacking.)
The app is sizing up to be a decent competitor to my surprise, but if I’m not mistaken the latest version still has a problem where it crashes on jail broken iPhones (i.e. half of them out there) and there hasn’t been an update in months. There used to be a notice about this on the appstore, but it’s no longer there despite the same version number, so I’m assuming Apple made them take it off since it was referencing jail breaking. So far, this app has had unacceptable support and for this reason I’ve chosen not to buy the app yet.
However I will say that when in use in the field, it worked better than I expected as far as the actual GPS functions go. Speed of travel is not the most accurate (says 1058mph or so for the first minute or so), but the arrow pointing in the direction you should be heading is immensely helpful and something a lot of other apps are lacking. Despite its’ shortcomings, this is still my favorite GeoCaching app for the iPhone right now.