Troubleshooting
Downloads that fail, maps that look empty, routes that will not plan, and a voice that has gone quiet.
Nine things that go wrong, and what each one actually means.
The download failed part way
Nothing is lost. Downloads are fetched in ranges and resume from where they stopped, so starting the download again continues it rather than restarting it.
If it keeps stopping in the same place, you are usually fighting the connection rather than the app: move somewhere with a steadier signal, or use a different network. A region is a big file and a flaky link will interrupt it repeatedly.
The download finished but said it could not be verified
Every region is hashed as it downloads and compared with the hash published in the catalogue. If the two disagree, the file arrived damaged — a proxy that rewrote it, a truncated transfer, a disk that ran out mid-write — and it is discarded rather than installed. That is the right outcome: a half-correct map is worse than no map.
Download it again. If it fails to verify twice, check that you have room on the device, and if it still fails, tell us which region it was; a bad published file is our problem to fix, not yours.
The region I want says “coming soon”
That region is on our roster but has not been built yet, so there is no file to download. It is listed rather than hidden so you can see it is coming. The Maps page shows what is built today, and Support is where to tell us which one you need next — that genuinely moves the order.
I want a newer build and downloading again does nothing
That is expected today. The app will not re-download a region it already has, so starting the download again finishes instantly with the copy you already own.
To take a newer build: delete your copy with the trash button in the Downloads tab, then download it again. An in-app check that notices a newer build is planned; until it lands, the Maps page is where the current build dates are published.
I ran out of space
Regions are single files, so removing one frees exactly its listed size and nothing else. Delete a region you are not travelling in, or free space elsewhere, then download again. Keeping two provinces on a phone is normal; keeping ten is not what the app is for.
The map looks empty
Zoom in.
Side streets, tracks, paths and buildings have a zoom at which they start being drawn, and below it they are deliberately left out. This is not a shortcut — at a whole-province view a residential street is thinner than a pixel, and drawing all of them turns a legible map into grey mush. So an overview shows motorways, water and place names; primary roads join a few levels in, residential streets around zoom 12, and driveways, tracks and footpaths after that.
Two related things that look like faults and are not. Names have their own, later thresholds than the roads and symbols they belong to, so a road can be drawn a while before it is labelled. And immediately after a pinch, the map sometimes draws for a moment with no labels at all while the new view is being prepared — a fraction of a second, then they are back.
If you are zoomed well in on a town and there is still nothing, check you are inside the region you downloaded. Panning past a region’s edge shows empty space, because there is genuinely no data there.
No route was found
Three usual causes, in order of likelihood:
- Your start or destination is not near a road. Both ends are snapped to the nearest road the mode may use, within about 500 metres. A pin in the middle of a lake, or deep in a forest block, has nothing to snap to and the app says No route found to that place. Move it onto or beside a road and try again.
- An avoidance made it impossible. Avoiding ferries when the destination is on an island, or avoiding unpaved roads when the last ten kilometres are gravel, leaves no legal route. Turn that switch off and route again.
- The two points are in different regions. Routing works inside one region today; a route across a provincial boundary is planned and not available yet.
The blue dot is stale, or it takes ages to appear
Your phone’s GPS receiver needs a clear-ish view of the sky, and with no network it has no cell-tower hint to speed up the first fix. Under heavy tree cover, in a narrow valley or inside a steel-roofed building, the first fix can take a minute or two.
What helps: start the app before you set off, while you can still see sky; keep the phone somewhere with a view out rather than in a bag; and give it a minute before deciding it is broken. Also check that location permission is granted, and — this catches people — that the app is allowed to use location while in use at the very least.
Voice prompts have gone silent
Work down this list:
- The speaker button in the navigation banner may be muted — it shows a struck-through speaker when it is. Fastest thing to check, and the usual answer.
- The phone may be on silent or turned right down. Media volume and ringer volume are separate on most devices.
- If audio is playing over Bluetooth, the prompt may be going to the car stereo on a source you are not listening to. Switch the stereo to the phone’s audio source.
- Some cars and headphones lower music for a spoken prompt and then keep it lowered — that is the phone ducking, not us. Pausing and resuming the music clears it.
Something else is wrong
Tell us. The useful details are: your platform and version, the region you had downloaded, roughly where you were, and what you expected instead. If it is a routing problem, the start and end points matter more than anything else.
If the map itself is wrong — a missing road, a wrong name, a closed campground — that is OpenStreetMap data rather than the app, and Support explains how to get it fixed for everyone.