How to use ViewRanger on Android to follow a track offline

The first thing you need to do is to ensure that your GPS is set to on. Download the app from Google Play. It will then prompt you to register yourself on my.viewranger.com.

Zoom out by touching the "-" button so that it showed at least the local area of your interest. Wait patiently as it start to locate itself and download the map into cache. Do this at home where you have your home wifi turned on and your phone connected to it otherwise ensure that you have unlimited data plan as the cache is preset to 100MB.

Touch the map area. A top bar and a bottom bar will appear. Touch the right most bottom bar icon that looked like a list. Select "Create Saved map". Select "street" regardless of whether it is selected already. You can now touch the map and select the areas. Press the "+" or "-" icon to zoom in and out. When you are sure all the area you needed is selected, click "download". It may take a long time to download depending on the area you selected. If I am not wrong, there is a maximum limit to the size of the area. Wait till download is completed.

Touch the screen and choose "list" button again. This time choose "offline". Touch the screen again and cliick on the "map" icon and select "organizer". Choose "Maps", "online maps", "openstreetmap" (unless you choose another map while creating your map), "my saved maps". Select the map that you saved and click "view". You are now on offline mode.

Next go to my.viewranger.com and create your track or download a track (you may need to pay to download a track). After creating and saving the track, go hack to your Android and click on "menu","options","settings","synchronize", Go back to "organizer", "Routes" and  click on the "down arrow" icon. Click "follow route" and you can start follow the route.

If your position is not at the route, there will be a black line from your location to the nearest waypoint. Just follow the direction. You may need to move around a bit to see where you are heading as it does not show your heading direction unlike other navigation program. However it does have movement direction indicator. Heading direction shows you the direction you (your handphone) are facing whereas movement direction show the direction you are moving. The former is better as you don't have to move to know where you are heading to.

If you have unlimited data plan and your route is always within the range, don't bother to use the offline method. This note is for people who don't have mobile data plan or the route is out of mobile data range.

IF you want to track your performance then there is a "rec" button at the bottom right side of the map. Click on it and you can track your performance. Make sure you don't touch the button again while navigating.