iPhone cycling apps
 

Has anyone tried any GPS cycling apps for iPhone, and if so any recommendations?

i use the Strava app occasionally. its a battery drainer, but not horrendous. if you use Strava anyway to keep track of stuff, its great.

I have iMapMyRIDE+ that I use once in awhile. It too is a battery drainer, and I wouldn't want to use it for 40+ miles in the event of an emergency and HAVE to make a call.

+1 for Strava.

i have imapmyride but I've remembered to use it like twice in my life. I did two different twenty mile rides on it and don't remember it killing my battery

Cyclemeter

Thanks all for the tips. Do you find the GPS/measurements are accurate?

In regards to mapmyride, I do think it is decently accurate for avg speed, route mapping, and mileage. Not sure how accurate the current and peak speed stuff is, but that's only because I don't have a bike computer to cross-reference.

i use cyclemeter and it works fine for me. i've used it on 30-60 mile rides without it draining my battery much. this is, however, when i'm not using it to FIND my way. i already know where i'm going so it's just running in the background tracking my progress. i would imagine that it would drain much quicker if i had to use it actively throughout the ride.

one thing that sucks about any GPS app however (regardless of which one) is that if you hop out of service, it doesn't work anymore. i've had that happen twice where it just makes a straight line from where it left service to picked it back up... throws off the whole thing

I bought cyclemeter yesterday night. I'll try it out soon. I absolutely despise attaching electronics to my bike. I also have and ride too many damn bikes (which is a big reason I hate the computers and attachments). I wanted to be able to track mileage in a convenient way. Average speed for a full trip is nice too. I don't care much for any other features at the moment. We'll see how well it works. The fact that I already take my iPhone with me on every ride, and that the app is only $5 made it worth giving a shot.

for android users Mytracks is a good app, it pops in every mile to tell you average speed and distance traveled, and you can look at all your stats when you are done the ride. ps its free

Been using BikeMateGPS for my iPhone. Usually go around ~30 miles and it doesn't kill the battery. I like the UI on it too, saves all your rides you want it to. Not sure about the speed accuracy but I've used it driving and it was pretty much on with my spedometer.

I've used iMapMyRide with "meh" feelings about it, and Strava with good feelings of the user interface and decent feelings of the app itself(although it seems to have less features than iMapMyRide. The reality is that I forget to start it at the beginning of most of my rides, or I forget to restart it when I stop to eat or something.

Another one for Cyclemeter. Really good but seems to have problems with accurate elevation measurement. I don't know if it the app or how the GPS on the phone works in general that causes this.

I like iMapmyride. It will also upload your progress as your Facebook status if you want it to. I only had a problem with it once. I rode about five miles and it said that I rode 3900 miles.

Has anyone else that uses it had a problem with the GPS? Everytime I load it, just before my ride, it tells me that it can not get a GPS signal and then asks should it continue anyway. Well I sayd "yes" and have no problems. No biggy, just kind of a hokey pain every time.

That would explain why you did 3900 miles in 5 miles.

At start up, it is trying to aquire multiple fixes in order to get your starting location more precisely. If you don't need to be precise (and don't mind the occasional 3900 mile travel distances) its usually not that far of with only a couple GPS fixes.

Happened a handful (<5) times to me, but only when my phone was connected to the wifi in my house as i was exiting it's range. iphone gets confused when going from wifi to 3g on the fly sometimes

Weather was great today, tried out Cyclemeter on my iPhone for the first time. I'm impressed with how well it worked. I played with it a couple days ago to be sure I knew how it worked. So today I just hit "Start", locked the display, put my phone in my pocket, finished my ride, pulled the phone out, and hit "Stop" and "Done". I had an email in my inbox containing the ride data and a nice little Facebook update was also created on me wall.

I rode for two hours and the battery life was 95%. I was expecting it to be nearly dead based on other peoples comments. I guess disabling/locking/whatever the display is all you need to do?

It had all the data I cared to see. I'm not big on crazy details and statistics. And it felt like the numbers it gave me corresponded to the actual ride. For example, I had mostly headwind on the way out, with tailwind on the way back. I was ~1 mph faster coming back even though my legs had less energy. Long story short; It seems accurate for my needs. I'm happy.

Yes completely agree with you regarding attaching stuff to bikes. My only concern is with regards to the accuracy of an app, but from what everyone is saying it sounds like on the whole they are ok.

Yep, your right. I remember that now.

I have used mapmyride and google's mytracks. if you do a road ride, or an out and back ride you can easily see where things don't match up exactly. For that reason I am a bit leary of things like top speed (yeah, I guess I could have been going 41.6mph last time I went mountain biking, but 35 is more likely). GPS often has a default target range of with 20 meters. Good enough for government work...

Interestingly using it in my car, the GPS ap is a lot more accurate than my car's speedometer on the highway (60mph on gps = 1 mile in 60 seconds, 60mph on speedometer = 1 mile in 65 seconds).