Ordnance Survey Tracking Order Status

I have used the OS maps app for several years now - it’s fantastic and saves buying maps ! Can’t fault it !

App was pretty good, but cancelling a subscription and closing your account is made (purposefully?) difficult. You have to contact OS to cancel your subscription, it is not self serve. However they made the effort to make starting a subscription self serve. I find this so annoying, the end-to-end experience of starting and stopping subscriptions should be self serve. Making the action of stopping a subscription involve more effort through a different less advertised route is so frustrating and comes off as deliberate. Actually wanting to remove your login and properly delete your account? - You have to request ‘to be forgotten’. This is via a webform that I never managed to find or via (yup, you guessed it) getting in touch with customer services. This is a poor experience. All of the above should be doable via the app and website or at least via the website.

I have been using OS maps on a GPS phone since Anquet in 2006. Today's OS app is a huge step forward from those primitive days. The Premium version is cheap at £24 a year. But the app is glitchy and rather basic. It takes up to 2 minutes to boot up (and once took 30 minutes). When you slip your phone in your pocket or close the case or the screensaver kicks in, it's liable to shut down and will take another 2 minutes to get going - not good if you're trying to find your position on a cold day in a bitter wind. The little red triangle that shows your position and direction of travel can't be relied on to point in the right direction - I always double check with a real compass. For poor signal areas I have about 30 offline maps stored on my phone. They can take an age to find and load because they can't be sorted into alphabetical order. When the app is used continuously, it uses a huge amount of battery power - my 5000mAh battery lasts about 4 hours. I have consulted Customer Services three times and found them to be good twice, uselss once. Updated March 2023: If you get a new phone, you will lose ALL your offline maps.

Sadly I can longer trust the app. Regularly in the Scottish wilderness I need the excellent defacto OS maps for navigating. The app used to be really excellent. Now there seems to be huge delay loading the maps even when you’ve downloaded for offline use. Whether you have a cellular or WiFi connection it makes no difference. I just can’t trust it’s going to work. To glitchy to trust. Such a shame. But I do love what they’re trying to do. Just remember OS maps this is about reliable nav first and foremost using the defacto OS mapping.

Ok when it works, but crashes freezes or just fails to open much more often than not. Restart, restart, restart ....