GPS Apps without offline Maps is a giant scam. AT&T is kidding themselves.

I don’t want to hear about any GPS system for the iPhone that doesn’t include offline maps. Hell, someone could release a free GPS navigation for the iPhone and I still wouldn’t use it if it didn’t include offline maps. This weekend I decided to take a nice little mini vacation and head to Tremblant for some rest and relaxation. Being Father’s Day on Sunday, I figured I’d head straight from Tremblant to Cornwall (My Parent’s Hometown). I mean I had Google maps and my iPhone clearly showed me the way. I made sure I had some information written down just in case things went south with my phone, and away we went.

As you can see by the Google maps attached below, I had two options. I could go through Montreal, or I could head to Hawksbury and then head south to Cornwall. It looked simple enough, and there was no reason why I couldn’t shave off an hour of time by taking the most direct route.

It looks simple enough right? Well, you see that nice bend in the road below? It was a disaster of epic proportions. Seconds after making the turn, I felt like I was in a rodeo. No exaggeration. Two ginormous pot holes on a dirt road. I felt like I had run over a dinosaur. They came at us out of nowhere. My immediate exclamation, “Fuck that!” There was no way I was embarking on a road that started off that way, so I figured I’d just find my way to the next closest town and readjust my directions. Oh, wait. No signal. Zero. Nada. I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no idea where the hell I was going to go next, or how long it would take me before I could find some service. It was a disaster. My two and a half hour trip turned into a four hour trip and there was nothing I could do about it, because my piece of crap map on my iPhone didn’t have any maps stored on the device. Lesson learned.

So, AT&T, and any other company out there thinking you can sell as a GPS application for ten bucks a month, without having access to offline maps, is seriously deluding themselves. It’s not worth it. Do the math. Approximately 120.00 dollars a year to access a GSP system that going to leave you high and dry when you need it the most. Sounds like a crappy idea to me.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio