The map screen

This is where you spend the whole ride. There are no tabs and no home screen — the map is the app. Everything else is a button on top of it or an item in the menu. Here’s what all of it does.

Across the top

The menu button sits in the top-left corner. Tap it for everything that isn’t on the map.

The search bar takes up the rest of the width and reads Search destination… until you use it. In landscape it’s narrower, to leave the map room. During navigation it’s hidden — you’re already going somewhere.

Down the right-hand side

Six round buttons, always in this order. None of them has a text label, so it’s worth knowing them by position. Each one lights up in its own colour when it’s on, and shows a spinner in that colour while it loads.

1. Record — red dot

   Starts recording your ride. While recording, the button grows taller, turns red and shows the elapsed time under the icon. If NavForge decides you’ve stopped for a break, the border turns orange and it says Paused.

2. Heatmap — pink

   Lays every ride you’ve recorded over the map, so you can see where you’ve already been.

3. Points of interest — yellow

   Shows fuel, food, hotels, camping and attractions as coloured badges. Tap a badge for its details.

4. Twisty roads — orange

   Colours roads by how much they wiggle. This is the one for planning a Sunday rather than a commute.

5. Restricted roads — red

   Draws gates, private roads and no-access tracks, so you can see them before you commit to one.

6. Recentre — green crosshair

   Brings the map back to you after you’ve dragged it somewhere else.

The four readouts along the bottom

A dark floating pill, dark in day and night mode alike. Left to right:

Speed

The big number on the left is your speed. Beside it, smaller and greyer, is the speed limit for the road you’re on. Under both is the unit, and next to that a small italic note telling you where the limit came from:

• · sign — there’s a signposted limit recorded for that road.
• · legal default — no sign is recorded, so this is the legal default for that kind of road in that country. Treat it as an educated guess, not a sign you missed.
• · route — taken from the route data while navigating.

Your speed turns red when you’re well over the limit and stays red for a few seconds after you drop back, so a glance down can’t miss it. Below about 3 km/h the number is replaced with a dash, and it clears the same way if there’s been no GPS fix for five seconds.

Elevation

Your height above sea level. While you’re following a route with elevation data, this tracks the route’s profile at your position; otherwise it’s straight from GPS.

Direction

One of the eight compass points — N, NE, E and so on. Standing still it comes from the phone’s compass. Once you’re moving it switches to your actual direction of travel, which is steadier and doesn’t care how the phone is mounted.

Lean

How far over you are, as a number in degrees, with no plus or minus — left and right read the same. It’s green normally, amber past your first threshold and red past the second, and it blinks in the red zone. Both thresholds are yours to set in Ride Settings.

The menu

Tapping the menu button slides up a panel. From the top:

• Display mode — three chips, Auto, Day and Dark. Auto follows sunrise and sunset where you are, and the line beside the heading tells you which one Auto has picked right now.
• Lock orientation — a switch. Turn it on and two more chips appear, Portrait and Landscape, so you can pin the screen the way your mount holds the phone. Off, it reads Rotate freely.
• Elevation Profile — only appears when there’s a route with height data to show.
• Download Maps — with a small number on it when one of your regions has an update waiting.
• Ride Settings — lean thresholds, when turns are announced, voice and intercom.
• Round Trip — generate a loop that brings you home.
• My Rides — everything you’ve recorded or imported.
• My Markers — spots you’ve saved.
• Explore Roads — opens our website in your browser, so it needs a connection.
• Ride Calendar — trips you’ve planned against a date.
• Group Ride — ride with other people’s positions on your map.
• Report a problem — tell us when something’s wrong.
• Settings — units and the rest.

Items your plan doesn’t include show a small gold padlock and their name in grey.

Before your first map is in

With no region installed there’s nothing to draw, so instead of a map you get a green outline icon, No map downloaded and Open the menu to download a region. On top of that, a rounded banner floats over the map reading No map downloaded · Tap to get started — tapping it goes straight to the region list. Both disappear the moment your first region finishes installing.

On the very first launch a welcome sheet comes up over the top of all this, with a green Download Maps button and a Maybe later underneath.

While you’re navigating

The screen changes shape once a route is running:

• The search bar goes away.
• A strip along the very bottom shows distance remaining and your arrival time.
• A pink Stop pill appears near the bottom. That’s how you end navigation — there’s no menu item for it.
• The POI layer, if you had it on, narrows itself to fuel only within about five kilometres of you. All the categories come back when navigation ends.
• After about ten seconds without a tap, the menu button and the six right-hand buttons fade out. Tap anywhere and they come back for another ten.

Moving the map

Drag to pan, pinch to zoom, twist with two fingers to rotate, and drag two fingers up or down to tilt. There’s no compass button to reset the rotation — the recentre button at the bottom of the right-hand column is what brings you back to yourself.

Press and hold anywhere on the map to drop a point. NavForge names the spot for you where it can, and offers the same options as a search result.