Speed and speed limits
Bottom-left of the map, in a dark pill: a big number for how fast you’re going, a smaller one beside it for the limit, and a short italic label underneath saying where that limit came from. That label is the important bit — it tells you how much to trust the number.
Your speed on the left in large digits, the limit beside it in grey. Underneath: your unit, then the source of the limit.
Above, the same pill with the digits red — the state you get when you’re well over the limit. The limit number itself never changes colour.
Your speed
The big number comes from your phone’s GNSS receiver — speed over the ground, not from any wheel sensor. Two rules govern whether it’s shown at all:
- It has to be at least 3 km/h. Below that you’re stationary as far as the app is concerned and you’ll see a dash. This is deliberate: GPS speed at a standstill is noise, and a phone reading 4 km/h at the lights is worse than useless.
- The fix has to be reasonably confident. If your phone reports its own speed accuracy as worse than about 3 m/s, the reading is suppressed rather than shown.
If your position stops updating altogether, the number clears back to a dash after five seconds.
Nothing else on the navigation screen warns you. If the speed goes to a dash while you’re clearly moving, the turn distances above it have stopped counting down too.
Where the limit comes from
NavForge tries four things in order and shows a label for whichever one answered. It never mixes them and never guesses.
-
· sign — a posted limit in the map data
Someone has surveyed this road and recorded the actual signed limit. This is the number on the pole. Trust it the most.
-
· legal default — the law for this country and road type
The map has no posted limit for this stretch, so the app applies the default that legally applies to that class of road in that country: an unsigned suburban street, a rural two-lane road, and so on. It’s the law, not a guess — but it isn’t a sign you’ll see, and any local exception overrides it.
-
· route — a limit carried in your route
Only appears while navigating. The routing engine recorded a limit for this leg when it built the route. It’s used only when neither of the two better sources knows.
-
Nothing at all
If none of the above can answer, the limit and its label are not drawn at all. You get your speed and nothing beside it. A blank here means “we don’t know”, and that is on purpose — inventing a plausible-looking number would be worse.
Most residential and minor roads have never had their limit tagged in the underlying map data, anywhere in the world. Every navigation app deals with this the same way — by applying the jurisdiction’s default. NavForge is unusual only in telling you which one you’re looking at.
Urban and rural defaults
For road types where the legal default differs between built-up and open country, the app works out which you’re in from how dense the surrounding road network is. It gets this right almost all the time, and gets it wrong in the obvious places — a long approach road into a town, an isolated cluster of houses on a highway. If the default looks off for where you plainly are, that’s usually why.
When the number turns red
Only your speed changes colour, and it uses a deliberate lag so it doesn’t flicker on and off with every GPS reading:
- It goes red once you’re more than 10 km/h over the displayed limit.
- It stays red through the band between 3 and 10 over.
- It goes back to white once you’re within 3 km/h of the limit and have held that for three seconds.
When the limit itself changes — you’ve turned onto a different class of road, or crossed into a new zone — the app reclassifies against the new limit immediately rather than carrying the old red state across.
There’s no chime, no spoken warning, no vibration for exceeding a limit. If the phone is in a tank bag or you’re watching the road — which you should be — you will not know. The colour change is a glance-down aid, not an alert.
The displayed limit is also not a legal reference. Map data goes stale, signs change, roadworks impose temporary limits nothing in the app knows about. What’s on the pole wins, always.
Units
Both numbers follow your Units setting. Set to imperial and a 50 km/h limit displays as 31, with mph underneath. The conversion is applied to the limit as well as your speed, so the comparison — and the red threshold — stay consistent.
It works without a route
The whole chain runs whether or not you’re navigating. Out for an aimless ride with no destination set, you still get your speed, the limit for the road you’re on, and the source label. The only tier that needs a route is · route, which is why you’ll never see that label while free riding.
It also works entirely offline, from the map region you’ve downloaded. No signal needed, ever.
· sign on a road you don’t know is worth acting on. · legal default on a road that feels faster or slower than the number suggests is worth a second look for an actual sign — that’s precisely the case the label exists to flag.