RouteYou App

Table of contents

How to install the RouteYou App

Watch this video to know how you can easily install the app. Or read the information further below. 

Install the RouteYou app on your phone in 3 steps:

If you follow these steps in Chrome on an android device, the RouteYou App is immediately installed on your phone. You will now find a RouteYou Icon on your phone (white background and green logo). This makes it very easy to use RouteYou next time. 
If you use Firefox or Safari you will receive instructions to install the app via an extra action. 

You no longer have to go to the Android Play Store or the Apple App store. 
Pay attention! There is also an Old RouteYou App. You can still use it. However, we recommend that you use the new version.

You now have a start button on your phone so you can easily start RouteYou with only one click.

If someone sends you a link of a route on RouteYou, then your phone will open it in the app without you having to do anything. 

How does the RouteYou App work?

Menu Structure

The menu structure is just the same as what you are used to on your desktop. Only the screen is much smaller and narrower. So occasionally you will find some differences in the structure of your screen. For example, you get an extra button to display the map.

The three main functions on your RouteYou App

(1) Searching a route

Watch this video on how to search for a route on your smartphone

(2) Travel a route

Read more about that here. 

(3) Plan a route on your smartphone

Watch the following video to learn how to quickly create a route on your smartphone. 

Other important RouteYou App options

Last Viewed

A feature that comes in handy and that you will find on your RouteYou App as well as on your desktop, is "Last viewed". What you watched yesterday, while preparing on your desktop, you will find in you recently viewed list on your smartphone today. Usually you wish to do a route that you have viewed recently.

Read more about that here.

Share routes

Found a nice route? You will also find the "Share route button" on the RouteYou App. Read more about that here.

Work offline

We are still working on this option. We expect that by mid-2020 you will also be able to download routes for offline use and thus be able to use the RouteYou App WITHOUT being connected to the internet. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What about the battery life of smartphones?

Bron: pxhere

The battery life of a smartphone is still a weak point in using the app on your smartphone. Escpecially when navigating, your battery life is consumed quite quickly. 

Why does your battery consumption increase when determining your position? 

That's because detecting a GPS signal (and thus determining your position) is a burden on your battery. Technically, this has to do with scanning the frequencies of the signals sent by the different satellites.

This is the case with all apps that use a GPS signal almost continuously. The RouteYou app is no different in that regard: the less your position is retrieved, the less battery consumption. When navigating, however, you do not want to wait 20 seconds before your position on the map changes, because then you may have already missed the turn. 

How long does an average battery last?

Your phone will last for 4 to 5 hours with a full battery.

A good rule of thumb is that you use about 20% to 25% of your battery per hour when navigating with your smartphone. This is a guideline, the actual consumption also depends on the quality and age of your battery.

Be aware! If your battery power is running to its end, it will deteriorate faster than at the beginning. So if you start at a full 100%, you will be at 80% after about an hour. However, if you only have 20% battery at the start, you will probably be at the end of your battery after 45 min.

Tips to extend the use of your battery

  1. Do not set the brightness of your screen too high.
  2. Turn off your screen if you don't need it. That way you can last a day with one charged battery. 
  3. Turn off other apps you don't need.
  4. If you can, don't let your battery run out, because that's not good for your battery life.
  5. Always take a charging cable with you: if you take a break somewhere to eat for example, you can ask whether you can literally charge your battery.
  6. Battery packs or power banks are - off course- the solution Praces vary between 30 and 100 euros. You can find some good solutions here. 

Why can I use my GPS device for a full day?

Specifically made GPS devices such as Mio, Wahoo, Garmin, ... usually last much longer than a day. Most of them allow you to change batteries, but with a charged GPS you can usually continue for several days. How come? Some tricks from the GPS bag of tricks:

  1. Your GPS processor is much less powerful than the one of your telephone. Don't forget that your current phone has a much more powerful processor than the first PC you ever bought. That is why it can do so many fantastic things like playing videos, taking beautiful pictures, teleconferencing, ... But all that comes at a cost. And that is not only the price of your phone but also that of energy. Your GPS and the additional processor have been chosen to do what it should do: navigate. It is not as multifunctional and less powerful, but it is much more energy efficient.
  2. Your GPS has a screen that consumes much less energy than the screen of your smartphone. As such, your smartphone has much nicer colors. Some GPS devices even have a passive screen.
  3. Finding which satellites send out a signal by scanning frequencies is also a high-energy affair. That is why many GPS devices have a frequency reference table that depends on your position and time. That table therefore knows that when you are at location LAT, LONG at time xx:xx, which satellites are "visible" for your GPS. So it doesn't have to check the frequencies of the satellites that aren't visible. As a result you can save some energy. But that trick can also be applied to your smartphone.

So it is give and take kind of thing.

The RouteYou app is technically a PWA

"PWA" stands for Progressive Web App. PWA's have many advantages. Especially if you compare it with the classic (native) apps.

Some examples:

Are there no advantages to Native Apps anymore?

There certainly are. Because you are closer to the Operating System of the device, you can do more specific things. However, they come with a considerable development cost. Browser technology increasingly adopts communication with your device via standards. For example, in the past you could not communicate with your smartphone via a browser about the input from GPS, camera, accelerometers, digital compass, and so on. In the meantime, that is all possible.

One of the most important aspects of native apps was "working offline". This is also changing thanks to PWA.

The trend on your phone is simular to the trend that you have gone through on your desktop in the past. Before 2005, we were almost all active through applications running on your computer. Think of writing documents (Word), spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, ...), reading e-mail, ... For each of those things you had to install a specific program. We occasionally used a browser but that was to consult information from a website. In the period 2005-2010, more functionality was offered via those websites, and thus via browsers. It was part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Many of us now use a website to write documents, to do calculations, or to read emails.

Technically those applications run in a browser. You don't have to install a thing!

This trend occurs on phones as well. We do less and less via a specific app that we install, but go directly via a website/browser.

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