Why does it take so long to download Gaia maps on android

Same issue. Not the phone or card. No solution.

<p style=”text-align: left;”>This gives me a question Gaia and Guthook – differences ?  I have Guthook and until recently have never heard of Gaia</p>

“Same issue. Not the phone or card. No solution.”

That’s the conclusion I came to after google search

Perhaps because Android sucks? Just a guess… :-)

No Droid problem with GB tiles on CalTopo.

Gaia servers?

Doug must be one of those annoying Apple users : )

One thing I noticed was somehow I had some duplicate maps.  When I deleted them from my (android) phone, it hung.  (Only adding fuel to Doug’s fire)

When I deleted them from “my maps” on my PC (not an apple product) it deleted them without problem.

Hmmm… maybe there’s something I can do to my data on my PC to make downloads faster.  It’s synced to my phone.  Maybe there’s some conflict that keeps causing the phone to hang…

I don’t have any problems at all downloading maps on Gaia. It goes pretty fast-maybe a minute or two. I have an Android based (if that’s still the term) Samsung Galaxy S8+.

I still remember when Apple people used to make fun of Android phones for having too big of a screen.

My guess is the Gaia servers and the software behind it. Download demand can vary quite a bit, depending on how many people are accessing the information at once. I wouldn’t think that it would be a huge priority for them. This is different than, say, Netflix. With Netflix, it is an essential feature. If you can’t handle the simultaneous demand for lots of data, you won’t be in business. It is also different than CalTopo (or the sites it proxies). In that case, the average user is somewhat limited to how much data they can demand. Once you download all the little squares for your page, you probably won’t be downloading that many more, and if you are, you will be doing so slowly (as you slowly slide your view). Downloading a “map” on Gaia is like accessing all the maps on CalTopo that you will ever look at, but in one big chunk. If lots of people are doing the same, it will take a while, unless they have put a lot of money into making it fast. My guess is they haven’t.

I have a Galaxy S9

I was poking around battery usage and somewhere it said that Gaia was using an excessive amount of battery because it was frequently crashing.  Now I forget where I saw that.

I selected to not auto resume map downloads

when I first turned on Gaia I went to “saved” and “downloads” and it says it’s syncing with the gaia cloud.  This takes maybe 10 minutes.

then I manually said to download one of my maps.

The map downloaded fast – 30 seconds to download one quarter of the file.  Then it started going slow – 2 hours to download the rest of the map.

Turned off syncing – that didn’t make any difference.

It downloaded the first quarter of the map fast so there’s probably no issue with internet, SAD card, or phone.  Must be some software conflict with syncing or something.

Okay, I’m bored.  I’ll just wait the 2 hours to download each map.  I have to leave the display on or it will quit downloading.

I have read elsewhere that part of the slowdown is because of third party map providers. This makes sense to me because I often experience wildly different download rates when downloading different map types before a trip.

I’m downloading gaia topo maps, so that’s probably not it, thanks

I noticed that from comments on the internet, when the gaia expert said that it was very aggravating to the user.  Maybe there were curse words intermingled, or maybe I had to read between the lines for that : )

I think androids are much more “open”.  Many variations from user to user or app to app.  Difficult for gaia to figure this out for each user.

I wonder if any apple users have this problem?

At this point, it’s just a mystery to be solved, and if it’s not solved no reason to get frustrated, I have a work-around

The most aggravating suggestion I heard on the internet was to switch from SD card to your main memory.  That would dump all your downloaded maps and you’d have to reload them.

“I wonder if any apple users have this problem?”

I don’t. At least not anymore. Gaia updated their iOS software a couple of years ago to help solve the issue of slow downloads then, it’s worked fine for me ever since over three different phones.

that’s interesting, maybe they’ll do that for android

Just a thought: is your app up to date? They recently updated it and one of the new features is faster downloads:

https://blog.gaiagps.com/easy-to-read-tiny-to-download-the-all-new-gaia-topo/

Thanks

The beginnings of my problems were that Gaia was crashing so I uninstalled it and then reinstalled, then WTF did I just do, I’m now going to have to wait for the maps to download again

oh well, at least since it syncs to the gaia cloud I can get everything back

I think I’m getting the new ones since I reinstalled

Just glancing, the newly downloaded maps seem better.  They’re better when you zoom out.

I think they compressed the files about 3x so they download that much faster.  But there’s still this slow download problem.  It only takes 2 hours rather than 6 hours to download one map : )

when I select “map download” and “auto resume”, then close and start the app again, it starts downloading 8 maps in parallel. All at the same slow speed.  Left phone plugged in with display on over night.  Almost done this morning.

of course leaving the phone plugged in over night consumes a bit of the battery lifetime, but just one night isn’t a big deal.

and leave it in “saved” and “downloads” so I can see the progress downloading.  So I know it hasn’t hung or stopped downloading.

finally finished.  Downloading sped up towards the end + 8 in parallel.  Something weird going on.

I think the new maps are quite a bit better, worth doing

Make sure you’re synced to the gaia cloud so you don’t lose anything, then uninstall gaia on your phone, then reinstall, then do like the previous two posts

Or, get an apple phone : )

Have you been using cellular or a WiFi network?

If you run this speed test on the phone, what do you get?

https://www.speedtest.net/

thanks

wifi

my pc does 54 mbps download, 18 mbps upload

sometimes it downloads much faster so I don’t think it’s the speed of the network or the SD card or anything.  Other apps run faster.

downloading all maps in parallel was much better

Try running it from your phone instead of your PC since that is where you’ve noticed slowness. What are your latency readings? They aren’t often mentioned but can really affect speed. You can sometimes improve latency by manually entering in DNS servers instead of using the ones automatically provided by your ISP.

Also, it does help to move your phone physically closer to your WiFi router so that you’re getting the best possible speed.

If Gaia is giving you headache consider Backcountry Navigator XE.  I have always liked BCNAV far better than Gaia, now that both are subscription services the switching cost is near zero.  You can give it a try, if you ask for a cancelation within a reasonable time they will give you a full refund.