I go walking quite a lot, and particular like wandering into the forest and hills off-trail. I like to have a general idea of the direction I am heading in, but decide the exact path based on the terrain around me. I've used various navigation apps, but all seem to suffer from a core annoyance... the need to unlock the phone to check progress. I often wear headphones so initially got to thinking about whether I could use stereo sound to represent my target - maybe a ping that would pan left or right, and a tone that would change or pulse depending on the distance. After quite a lot of experimentation, I found that using the voice API was more precise and easier to interpret (I may revisit stereo tones later!). I can simply get the phone to tell me bearing and distance. The other advantage is that this works well with the phone's built-in speaker too. Most mobiles these days have a compass to figure out direction, and GPS to find your location. I started with the assumption that a phone in a pocket could not really resolve direction reliably as would not be horizontal, so worked on figuring out direction based on movement, which would be independent of the orientation of the phone. After a few weeks, even with a lot of filtering experiments, I found it impossible to make this work. The speed of walking is too slow compared to the accuracy of the GPS. But then I discovered that the magnetometer in phones works in 3 dimensions. So with suitable programming, a phone vertically in a pocket can give reliable direction info. I found this works best in a chest pocket, or a lanyard around your neck, where the phone is most stable. Initially I had a configurable period - updates every 1, 2 mins, etc. But then got to thinking whether it was possible to have "updates on demand". The obvious way to tell the phone to give you an update was a tap on the case. After more experiments, I settled on a double-tap. This gave the best combination of reliable, simple triggering without false positives. I still have a lot more planned, but I think this first version is useful enough to release now. It is Android only at present, but built in Maui, so I am looking at iOS later if there is demand there.

VozNav

The walking app you don't need to look at.

The walking app you don't need to look at.