Offline

Living in a 4G-covered world blurs completely the notion of local ("I have it on my device") versus cloud ("I can access it with my device") origin of data. 5G (low latency) and Starlink (outreach) will contribute to that blur even more. So most people just don't care.

But there are situations (some more and some less severe) when local matters. I seem to be one of the few who really care. Perhaps frequent travel is the reason why.

Starting with those "less severe" situations, we typically have commercial flights and roaming. Many airlines offer "online" experience today, some with decent speeds, some completely terrible. Some even add most confusing business models on top - I remember flying Swiss from ZRH to LAX (en route to Las Vegas) when I realized I should look for Cirque du Soleil tickets in advance and had hard time figuring out how many kB of data I should purchase from the airline to safely book that ticket....

Still, for private on board entertainment, the best option is to HAVE the data locally on a device. Luckily most of the apps and services (Netflix, YouTube Premium, Spotify Premium) offer that in a fairly seamless fashion (you just need to remember to download the content before boarding).

Google Maps goes a step ahead, taking over management of trips, it prompts you to download maps for destinations you will be visiting. Unfortunately the Maps data is not good for any off-road activity, including hiking trips in remote areas.

Gaia GPS remains the king of the off-the-beaten-path hiking experience. It works just great on iOS and is usable on Android (if I ever switch to an iPhone this will be because of how better Gaia is on the Apple platform...). Unfortunately Gaia has no direct support for Garmin watches (which is the 2nd drawback, after poor Android performance). For Garmin, so far, the Open Topo Map has been the winning source of offline topo maps. But the inconvenience is to manually manage Gaia downloads for a phone, GPX tracks serving as Garmin courses and the underlying topo maps.

There was a hope of unifying that experience, when I stumbled upon WikiLoc, a very nice system of a web portal, mobile app and a companion app for a Garmin watch. It seemed like a great combo, but the dream was interrupted with interruption of Internet connection. It turned out that even the premium version of WikiLoc did not support offline, which, for a trekking application, simply disqualifies it.

Offline is important. It may even be life-saving. A year ago Gaia guided us perfectly in a fog though the night descent from the Aguelzin Pass in High Atlas. This year Gaia, backed by saved GPX courses in the fēnix watches scored perfectly as the guidance system for the Tian Shan trek in Kyrgyzstan. When you are on completely your own, it is good to have the data with you.