It’s been 10 years since I geocached and the official app is still as bad as I remember
About 10 years ago I was playing Ingress and geocaching as part of attempting to get some low-level exercise in with my wife as she was about to baby. At the time the official geocaching app was terrible, my battery was being eaten alive and portable chargers were required to even attempt to keep things running.
Add to that that the geocaches were quite often labeled and tagged by people who’s phones were off by a good 300 feet.
Due to a Girl Scouts thing coming up we as a family went out geocaching the other day and I was reminded of the early 2010s in which the app was off, directions were terrible, and finding things was problematic.
First thing we ran into was a search for a defunct geocache. It had evidently been put there about the time I quit geocaching and there was little to indicate that it had not been found for years. Not sure who that’s on but anything that hasn’t been found in over a year, two, or three with people reporting they didn’t find it does not really need to be on my radar.
We set the kids to navigating with a phone and the compass decided to rotate causing the maps to be off which lead us up a hill and an attempt to go through the woods. I got the phone back and realized the display was 30 degrees off based on the road behind us and checked compass accuracy elsewhere. Google Maps had no problem with the compass. Don’t know what’s up with Geocaching.com’s. By our last find we were driving to a different location and the compass was now 180 degrees off.
While standing still the official app is pulling GPS data out of its butt and I move around rather consistently.
Meh, I’m sure it’s better and memory is just off, but it’s been a challenge attempting to navigate, teach the kids to look at the terrain and realize that what the app is showing is quite skewed from reality, and then just showing up and realizing that a cache has been defunct for years (which maybe if I’d not been 1000 feet from the thing I’d have researched a little closer.)
Seems like at $25 a year for premium you’d get a bit more in the app…
