Please help a returning user

Discussion Android App
1

I’ve used Kurviger for years so I’m accustomed to the weird approach to new versions and feature upgrades, however having not used the app for a year I am utterly confused.

Is it really the case that by updating to K3 I have lost all my carefully organized offline maps and any ability to choose which data is shown on screen? I feel like I must be stupid: where do I turn on the option for time to next waypoint, etc? And given that I ride with pre-planned routes, how do I stop the Curvy options and Avoid Road Types options from taking up 20% of the screen if I want any data about the route showing? And where is navigate to Start? These are simple things.

I’m sure this must have been discussed but I haven’t been on the forum for a year, Search doesn’t bring up anything and the forum is honestly not easy if you only speak English.

If I want to control what is shown onscreen, should I install the old K2 version? That seems insane. Seriously, what the heck happened to this app? I feel like five and more years of being a customer has been sacrificed in order to get me to spend an extra $15 for less functionality. I’m willing to learn if functionality is hidden in a new option somewhere but it is essentially unusable if what I am seeing is all there is. Either way, it’s an awful customer experience.

2

Hi Chris, welcome back
The “changeover” announcement for K3 is here, note that this was an extraordinary situation and certainly not something we wanted to inflict on you all. But we had to start the app almost from scratch and we’re a tiny team of 4 (not even full-time) people, so yeah, some functionality is still not there, but we’re working hard to bring K3 up to speed. You can find the planned features here

In the meantime if you can’t live without a specific feature, we won’t stop you from using the older versions (in parallel). Also we’re really super active here on the forum and you can tell us (as you’re doing right now) which things are important and missing.

Offline maps in Kurviger 3 are handle in a much simpler way than before, as a Tourer+ subscriber you’ll find them in the sidebar. Also the path along your current route is downloaded automatically in the background when you start the navigation, no need to download country-specific maps anymore

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During navigation, click on the destination / waypoint data to switch between duration and arrival time. This is clunky and hidden, we know, we are currently actively investigating how to improve this!

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You’re talking about the planning view? There are buttons at the top-right to make the data window larger or smaller :slight_smile:

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When you click “start navigation” and your current location is not near the start, this popup will automatically show up, and you can decide how to handle your desired process

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Yeah we are aware of that and it’s super tricky, since we now have quite the international audience, there are posts in German, French, Dutch and English. For now we simply have to work with Google Translate as we need to pool our resources and don’t have a support team which could take care of dedicated help sites. This is a place for the community to meet and help each other out when the developers currently just don’t have the time, we need to keep this in one place. See also this. As for all other things I have written here: do let us know if you can think of a better solution

I really hope I was able to improve your experience here. We truly did our best to communicate the changes on Kurviger in all available channels. We posted to Facebook, Instagram, our blog, the forum here, we have a Changelog, you get emails from forum posts, etc.

As I said it was a rough situation but we did the best we could with it: you now have one account for web and app, the cloud is synced automatically, the app is more lightweight to use, it already has lots of features the old app didn’t even have and there’s so much more to come

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Bleiben die einmal heruntergeladenen offline Karten für immer gespeichert ?
Kann man die wieder löschen um Speicherplatz zu sparen ?
Gibt es eine Erklärung zur Handhabung von offline Karten in K3 ?

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Ja, diese findest du bei uns in der Doku: Offline-Karten Tutorial [Kurviger Knowledgebase]

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O.k. Danke !

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About a year ago the developer of the old K2 left the Kurviger team.
You can read the related discussion here [Discontinued] Kurviger app

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I much appreciate your thoughtful reply and such response is why I have been loyal to Kurviger. I live in San Francisco and work in the start-up community so understand the difficulties of app development with a small engineering team. BUT…

  • you really need to put a notice or two on the site and/or on the top of the forum explaining the situation. A little communication would gone a long way to reducing my three hours of confused frustration.

  • within the app I strongly suggest you put some energy into UX. I work within literally dozens of apps every day and I simply didn’t understand some of the interface choices made (the big ad covering the Settings option in Tourer effectively making it unusable really gave me a bad taste). And (from what I can tell) the only options for onscreen data re waypoints being either “None” or “lose 20% of the screen to options you don’t use” is just nuts. Surely offering the option to show a couple of information pills is one of the easier engineering tasks to knock off the list?

  • and then there was my user experience yesterday, leading a group ride. This is purely subjective to my specific circumstance, of course. First I realized the app refuses to work in landscape mode, or at least it did for me, so my usual riding mode had to be abandoned (I run a tablet with 50% of the screen in Kurviger and 50% showing offroad trails in Locus), so I turned off Locus losing visibility into the trails around us, and turned the tablet vertical, but then as we explored a side road up in the mountains (a surprising amount of California is remote and has no cellphone coverage so offline operation is essential to me) and I got a no network coverage notice. (does BRrouter no longer work offline too???). There’s no time to mess around doing diagnostics during a ride so I just gave up and ended up using the TomTom app to navigate waypoint by waypoint (because it works perfectly offline and it’s just a standard consumer app rather than a dedicated motorcycle app…)

And after all this, I’m STILL not clear if I can use the app and re-routing when offline, or if there is any way to get any waypoint data onscreen without also having all the Curvy options, or if I can downgrade to the old version.

I like you guys and understand your situation but man, you might have lost me with some of your choices.

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Sorry, K3 currently has no support for BRouter.
It can navigate offline a planned route, but for rerouting or planning it needs internet

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Wow. So we are a year into development of K3 and there is no support for BRouter??? Surely that would simply need implementation of an api? Would there even need to be coding involved - BRouter does all the work surely? And there isn’t even any indication on them roadmap forum that is a planned feature.

That is astonishing to me: an app supposedly developed with one eye on an international audience but it is totally reliant on an active cell-phone connection which isn’t something that can be depended even in somewhere as technically advanced as California! I just don’t get it. Are they really just developing for riders in Germany that are never out of cell range for more than a few km? On my ride yesterday we were out of cell range for five hours…

Okay, They got my $30 via the bull crap covering of the settings menu with the ad, and I’ve got an app that is useless to me. Disappointing doesn’t come close to describing my feelings about the direction this has taken. I’m out. Good luck, guys.

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For how long do you expect us to keep this up? This information is now over a year old. We have posted this info very prominently for several months.

What ad are you talking about? In the app we have a small banner that cannot grow larger than 10% of the height IIRC. If you open a menu, this ad should disappear. I am not aware of huge ads.

The planning mode does not work in landscape on smartphones yet, it should work on tablets. Navigation works with both orientations.

While I still don’t know what ad you are talking about, I would like to mention that you can cancel within the free 7 day trial, if you were already charged and are having remorse about your purchase, please send me a PM, with your subscription and I can check if we can offer you a refund.

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“If you open a menu, this ad should disappear.”
This didn’t happen on my Samsung tablet. With the Tourer subscription, when I opened the menu, the ad at the foot of the page almost entirely covered the Settings option, effectively making the app inoperable. It felt like a deliberate choice to force upgrade. If it was accidental, what did you expect would happen when you put Settings at the foot of the menu and then overlaid an ad?

“For how long do you expect us to keep this up? This information is now over a year old.”
I understand, however you also should understand that it is extremely rare for a paid upgrade to a new release of an app to remove major (and in my case, essential) functionality. It’s not your fault, but you can’t be shocked when even loyal customers are caught by surprise. It’s an awkward PR problem, but that’s the job.

“Navigation works with both orientations.”
I don’t know how to connect what you are saying with my own experience. I’m running Android 13 and navigation refused to work in landscape for me.

“While I still don’t know what ad you are talking about, I would like to mention that you can cancel within the free 7 day trial, if you were already charged and are having remorse about your purchase, please send me a PM, with your subscription and I can check if we can offer you a refund.”
I appreciate that. I will PM you later today.

Please understand, I’m not trying to give you guys a hard time. I like kurviger and respect what you’re trying to do. But UX is most important at the moment customers have just spent money, and mine was - for whatever reason - just not very good.

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@ChrisT

Perhaps it would be a good idea if you could provide us with screenshots of the strange displays so that we can see what you really mean.

I use Tourer+ myself and can’t reproduce what you describe.

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I’m a little puzzled by your reply. How would you be able to reproduce an issue with an ad covering a menu option, when Tourer+ specifically doesn’t display ads? I would take a screenshot, but the behavior forced me to upgrade to Tourer+ myself so I don’t see ads either now.

Let me ask: are you saying that that the ad should disappear when the menu is opened? Because that simply didn’t happen and should be easy to test.

Alternatively, if that isn’t what you are saying, what did you expect to happen when you overlaid an ad at the foot of a list of menu items? Did you assume that there was no possible combination of screen sizes/zooms that would conceal options?

Again, trying to be constructive.

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Hello Chris,
I check my Tablet Samsung s6 Lite:
With Tourer Subskription and login.

No advertising

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No Login = like free version. Ad is visible, that’s all.
I dont test the behavior if Samsung internal letter zoom is changed.

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Change Orientation from Landscape > Potrait and vice versa there is a buttont to fix the orientation

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On Phone same result.

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These are pictures of the website, not the app, surely? My points apply only to the app.

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Hi Chris,
you wrote about your Samsung Tablet.
The pics are from the real Tablet.
The Plannig on a Tablet looks like the webside, true.

On my Samsung Phone (without Login)
it could look like this:
A finger tip on several positions delete the black field

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When you are logged in:

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Currently the Plannin mode is always Potraid but Navigation screen both, see above.

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There is no separate app for tablets. You’re running the website on your tablet, which is fine, but doesn’t reflect the subject of this thread.

As for the pictures of your phone, I’m not sure what you are trying to tell me? Are you suggesting that I imagined the ads? Or that they don’t appear, even though the replies above confirm that they do?

If your experience is better than mine and the functionality of K3 is what you need, then I am happy for you. I’m not trying to fight anyone.

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We try to understand.
The First pics come from the App installes ON Tablet.
IT Looks Like Website. Because the App still Not optimized for Tablet useage.
The add you have a Problem can Not reproduce.
You have the Option to send a Screenshot.
Push the Volume - and Power Button Same time for a Screenshot.
Again If you are logged in, never any Add will visible

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On my Samsung tablet the app looks identical to how it looks on my phone with the planning section at the top of the screen.

You seem to be saying your app is designed to change layout to mirror the website at a certain screen size. That’s an interesting approach (I have no idea why you would do that, to be honest. If a user wants to use the website interface, why wouldn’t he just run it in a browser window?) but not one my tablet is demonstrating. Again, in case I wasn’t clear, on my Samsung tablet the app looks identical to how it looks on my phone, with the planning section at the top of the screen.

As for ads in Tourer, I can’t help you with screenshots because I upgraded to Tourer+ in an effort to get rid of them.

Let’s not go round in circles. If you are happy that your UX is great and that my experience is due to user error, that’s fine. Good luck to you. I would only suggest that you consider how it is that a loyal, tech-friendly customer found himself spending three hours grinding his teeth one evening, and then abandoning the app completely mid-ride the following day. Am I an idiot? For sure, but maybe you need to make things a little more clear?

Good luck, guys. I am an ex-customer but I wish you well.

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Your initial post asked for help. It was offered and even explained that you can continue using the old version, but your only responses were insults.

You end by saying you wish them well, but your previous words and attitude do not convey that. It seems disingenuous.

You’re obviously frustrated when returning to the app after being away for so long, but maybe try to approach people in a more friendly way? Or maybe develop your own app. You seem to feel that it is simple and that you have the connections to do it. We all have different needs, and there is no one perfect motorcycle trip planning and navigation app. This development team has been doing the best they can, and they have been very responsive to their users. I just don’t see the need to be so condescending and rude. They don’t deserve that, and it doesn’t help anyone.

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