What works without signal

NavForge is built to keep working when the bars run out. Almost all of it does. This page is the honest line between the two — what carries on out in the scrub, what quietly gets worse, and the one feature that stops entirely.

The short version

Once a region is on your phone, you can navigate, hear turns, see speed limits, get camera warnings, find fuel and record the whole ride without any signal at all. What you lose is the polish on search, and anything that talks to other people or to our servers.

Works with no signal

  • The map — drawn from the region files on your phone, not fetched as you ride.
  • Routing and turn-by-turn — the route is worked out on the phone. So is every reroute when you go off course.
  • Voice guidance — spoken by your phone’s own speech engine. NavForge never fetches audio.
  • Speed limits — read from the region, with a small label under the number telling you where it came from.
  • Speed camera alerts — camera positions ship inside the region.
  • Fuel, food, hotels, camping and attractions — the POI layer reads straight off the phone and never touches the network.
  • The twisty-road and restricted-road layers.
  • Recording a ride, ride stats, and the heatmap of everywhere you’ve been.
  • Markers you’ve saved, and the ride calendar.
  • Importing and exporting GPX files.
  • Recent searches — your last ten destinations, kept on the phone.
  • Search — with one significant limit, below.

Needs signal

  • Downloading, updating and listing map regions. The region list comes from our server. If you’ve loaded it before, a saved copy is shown instead, marked with a small cloud icon and the tooltip Showing cached list.
  • Full address and brand search. House numbers, business names and anywhere outside your downloaded region need a connection.
  • Group Ride. This is the only feature that genuinely stops without internet.
  • Explore Roads, which opens our website in your browser.
  • Requesting a region that isn’t available yet.
Reporting a problem works either way.

If you send a report with no signal you’ll see Queued — will send when connected. It sits on the phone and goes out next time NavForge starts with a connection.

Search is the real cliff

Search doesn’t stop when you lose signal, but it changes character, and the change catches people out.

Offline, search matches from the start of a name — never the middle.

Looking for Broken Hill? Typing hill finds nothing. Typing broken finds it. With signal there’s no such restriction. If a search comes up empty out of range, try the first word of the name before you assume the place isn’t there.

Offline, search knows about towns, suburbs, cities, villages and hamlets; road and street names; and named fuel stops, food, hotels, camping and attractions — all from the regions you’ve downloaded. It does not know house numbers. There is no offline street-address index, so 42 Church Street won’t resolve. Search the street or the suburb and pan the map from there.

The empty-result message points at the most common cause: offline search has nothing to search until a region is on the phone.

The second most common cause is the one the message can’t tell you about — you’ve typed a word from the middle of the name.

An offline search that found nothing. drawn from code
You can’t tell which results came from the phone.

Offline results are not reliably marked. Most of them show the same icon as online results and no label at all. Don’t use the look of a result to work out whether you’ve got signal.

How NavForge decides whether you’re online

It doesn’t trust Android’s little Wi-Fi symbol. When the connection changes, NavForge makes a real request to our server and waits up to four seconds for a reply. If nothing comes back, it treats you as offline and goes straight to the data on your phone.

The awkward case: connected but no actual internet.

A dead zone where the phone still shows a bar, or a pub Wi-Fi that wants you to log in, both look like a working connection. NavForge only re-checks when the connection itself changes, so it keeps believing you’re online and keeps trying the online lookup first. Search still works — it falls through to your offline data — but it can take several seconds, with nothing on screen explaining the wait. If search feels sluggish, turning aeroplane mode on and off gets it back to a clean answer.

Group Ride

Group Ride is the one part of NavForge that needs a connection to do anything. Positions are exchanged with our server every 30 seconds, so a rider’s dot can be up to half a minute behind where they really are — worth remembering before you take a turning on the strength of it. When somebody drops out of coverage, their dot stops updating.

Long-pressing the map

Press and hold anywhere and NavForge names the spot for you. With signal it looks the name up properly. Without it, it falls back to the towns and suburbs in your downloaded region and picks the nearest sensible one — a city or town within about five kilometres, a suburb within two, a hamlet within six hundred metres.

If there’s nothing near enough, you get the coordinates instead. Those work perfectly well as a destination.

Planning for a ride out of range

  1. Download every region you’ll cross

    Before you leave, not at the last servo. On the free plan that’s one region, so pick the one you’ll spend most of the ride in.

  2. Search for your destination while you still have signal

    Anything you look up stays in your recent searches, and a result found online is remembered for a day. Both work with no signal afterwards.

  3. Set the route before you lose coverage if the destination is fiddly

    A remote roadhouse or a business name may be findable online and not findable offline. The route itself is worked out on the phone, so once it’s set it survives the coverage dropping.

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