The best free GPX navigation app for motorcycles

Searching for a free GPX navigation app turns up dozens of results, and most of them are free in the sense that opening the file costs nothing. The part you actually need — being told where to turn, out loud, while riding — is where the subscription usually appears.

Here is what separates them, and how to find out in ten minutes rather than on a mountain road.

Importing a GPX is not the hard part

Reading a GPX is trivial. It is plain XML with coordinates in it, and any app that handles routes at all can parse one.

Three things after that are not trivial, and they are what you are really choosing between:

• Navigating it with voice. Turn-by-turn, spoken, so you are not reading a screen at 90 km/h.
• Recalculating when you leave it. Roadworks, a closed bridge, a wrong turn, a coffee stop.
• Working without signal. Most good roads are where the coverage is not.

Plenty of apps do the first and charge for the rest. Some do all three and charge for all three.

Route or track — this is why imports go wrong

A GPX can hold two quite different things, and the difference decides how well it navigates.

A route is a short list of waypoints. The app works out the roads between them, which means it can also work them out again when you deviate.

A track is a recording — often thousands of points, one every few metres, of where somebody actually rode. It is a line, not a plan.

Hand a track to an app that reads it literally and it will try to navigate every point in it, which sounds like a turn instruction every fifty metres. An app that handles it properly map-matches the trace to real roads first, then derives sensible turns from that.

If a GPX from a friend navigates badly, this is almost always why — not the app, and not the file being broken. The full route-versus-track explanation is here.

What free should include

Free is easy to advertise and harder to mean. The test is what happens on the ride rather than in the store listing:

• Turn-by-turn voice along an imported GPX, not just a line on a map
• Recalculation when you leave the route
• Offline map for the route’s corridor
• Export back out to GPX, so the route stays yours

Motoridez does all four without a paywall, and records the ride while you follow it. It also remembers every road you have ridden, so the next route it builds can avoid them — which is the opposite problem to following someone else’s file, and the one most riders have after a year in the same postcode.

Ten minutes in the driveway

Whatever you install, test it on a road you know before you trust it on one you don’t.

1. Import a GPX of a ride you have already done.
2. Start navigation with the phone mounted and the comms connected. Check the voice actually comes through.
3. Ride two streets in the wrong direction on purpose. See whether it recalculates or keeps pointing at the old line.
4. Put the phone in flight mode and check the route still draws.

That sequence takes ten minutes and tells you more than a week of reading comparisons — including this one.