Article Review: Comparison of Offline 4WD Maps & GPS Navigation Apps & Software

Thanks Michelle.

I do understand that EO has 2 roles wrt this, and probably the most profitable is the EO product, not the site.

I actually went to look at this article to see if EO would work with Android Auto. While there are lots of mapping programs that do, none of the decent 4wd ones appear to - yet.

Also it would be interesting to discuss the Japanese Augmented Satelite system QZSS which is already available in Australia and under trial by the government for their use. It does work with with phones after about the iPhone 8 and some android phones which use the Qualcomm processor. ( eg most chinese ones and Samsung S20 FE).

That gives about 20cm accuracy but the program using the GPS location needs to know to use it.

A lot of people are very confused about Android Auto (and CarPlay for that matter). There has never been an opportunity for a developer to submit a Navigation app to the system (owned by Google) as Google have this category covered by their own apps - WAZE, Google maps. However, just recently, Google finally opened up the category to third party developers and there was a closed project to do this - with a strict set of guidelines - in fact developers have to design from the ground up using a design guideline and templates provided by Google. It is not as simple as just "screen mirroring" an existing app like ExplorOz Traveller into the system so yes, we looked at it, and realise this is so far removed from what ExplorOz Traveller is about, its perhaps not worth it. We don't currently have that type of capital that would be required to support the investment it would take to redesign and build a new app to fit the Android auto system. Perhaps if more people supported the existing app and we could x10 our current sales turnover then maybe we would be in a better position.... apps like ours are really very bespoke.

In regards to the GPS systems - my younger brother is actually on the SBAS team in GeoScience Australia. He travels around fixing existing (ground GPS sites) and installing new NPI sites which are not SBAS but a pre-SBAS test. He repaired 2 sites for the Jap space probe that came back to Womera too. My brother has explained that in Australia the SBAS is what they call the Australian Augmented system - in Australia we are actually trialling our own system not using the Japanese one. And Australia is actually doing this as a joint project with NZ. If you go on the GeoScience Australia website you can read more about it - see GeoScience Australia - Trial of Accurate Positioning SBAS