Bikemap reviews
What users love and hate, from real reviews
A cycling app for planning and recording rides on a huge library of user-submitted routes — yet almost all basic navigation sits behind a subscription, and the turn-by-turn guidance is so unreliable that people keep falling back to Google Maps.
What users love
Huge route library and bike-trail visibility are the real draw
Despite everything, what keeps people is the rich worldwide library of user routes and the fact that it surfaces bike paths and trails invisible to Google Maps — colour-coded and named. For discovering new routes and exploring an unfamiliar city, people call it a 'must'.
it can finally see bike trails that google maps cannot see and the best part, it saves your activity and how high you have climbed
If you are interested in exploring a new city on a bike, this app is a must.
Clearly marks out and names, cycle routes, greenways and paths in different colours, so it's easy to follow.
When it works, it logs rides well and routes you safely
For happy users it all comes together: the app reliably records the track, distance, elevation and average speed, supports pause/resume and export to Google Fit. Routes run longer than Google Maps but safer and prettier — through parks and away from traffic.
Routes always take longer than Google Maps, but they're always more safe, relaxing, and beautiful.
the app recorded everything well and exported it to Google fit at the end. I really liked the option to stop the navigation/recording and continue it later on.
Nice for recording rides on the road and re-riding favourite saved routes. Good user interface. I like the ability to Pause and Resume the ride as required.
What users hate
You can't turn on navigation without paying
The single biggest sore point: for free you only get to look at the map and plan a route, while the 'start trip' button and turn-by-turn navigation are locked behind a paid subscription. Users feel baited — the app is marketed as free, yet without premium they can do 'literally anything'.
I can't even start my gps routing without facing a paywall. Hell nah
Turn by turn navigation behind a paywall is a huge turnoff
without premium the most you can do is plan a route. that's it. you won't be able to turn on any navigation, that is pay walled.
Routing sends you down nonexistent and dangerous roads
The router constantly plots paths through roads that don't exist, through woods, rivers, fences, ravines and even a mine field. People hit dead ends and impassable terrain — for a navigation app this is a safety issue, not a convenience one.
the route planner literally led me through a mine field when I was cycling in Bosnia. there's a 50/50 chance our route is passable
it constantly takes me down routes where there is no road or even trail.
it showed roads that literally don't exist, got a lot of dead ends also again got in the woods where there was a river in the middle of the road
Turn-by-turn lags, doesn't recenter or reroute
Even for paying users, voice guidance calls turns too early, too late, or not at all. The map won't recenter after a missed turn and there's no rerouting — leaving people to restart the app mid-ride.
it announced turns too early, too late or not at all. the map doesn't recenter if I missed a turn
Navigation lags, and voice directions are delayed to the point of missing turns.
navigation mode is buggy and frankly useless
Ignores bike paths that are visible on its own map
The very paradox people install it to avoid: it routes you onto busy car streets while skipping dedicated bike lanes — even ones its own map displays. The bike-specific routing ends up worse than Google Maps.
I can see cycle paths on the maps but bikemap clearly can't. Irony! The routes use busy city and suburban streets rather than dedicated bike paths.
for some reason it actually avoids using the bike path best my home. and wants me to ride through downtown traffic.
The bike-centric routing is worse than GMaps, CityMapper, and Cyclers. It doesn't utilize any of the dedicated bike lanes
Address and place search simply doesn't work
A core function fails at step one: search returns nothing, can't find even nearby well-known places, or offers a same-named address thousands of kilometres away. It's especially broken outside Europe/US — Japan, Australia, Korea and India addresses go unrecognised.
Search doesn't work. No matter what I type, it stays blank, no results, nothing.
Will not allow me to find and select a destination. So, totally useless.
Not usable in Japan. I tried entering my home address in both Japanese and English and it had no idea what I was talking about.
Won't let you set a start point — only routes from here
The app insists on starting from your current location and won't let you pick an arbitrary start point. You can't plan an A-to-B ride the way Google Maps does when A isn't 'home', and you can't set a route's end point.
App insists on starting at current location (home) as opposed to letting me designate desired target to plan route.
the app still doesn't allow a simple routing from A to B where A is not my current location
Если пишешь трек - невозможно установить конечную точку маршрута. Очень жирный минус
Ride recording drops out mid-ride
GPS recording is unreliable: the track cuts out, logs only a few points across miles, draws straight lines, or invents wild elevation gain. Worse, the app logs people out on its own and the ride isn't saved at all.
It's picking up only 3 or 4 points across a 5 mile and not accurately tracking route or distance.
On a flat track of 60 km it added an ascent of 800 m! Almost 700 m more than in reality!
Keeps logging me out so my rides are not recorded,which is very annoying.
Demands card before trial, then traps the subscription
Just to try it you must hand over card details up front with no way to look first. Then come payment errors, charges without consent, an inability to cancel, and refusals to refund. People call it a predatory scheme and a scam.
You can't see what it doesn't do until you've paid to see the things it doesn't do.
If you activate the one hour trial you get charged 6 EUR immediately.
Same day Bikemap tried to withdraw 99 usd for lifetime membership from my card
Laggy, crash-prone and a battery hog
The interface is slow and unstable: it freezes, crashes several times an hour, and 'back' closes the whole app instead of undoing an action. On top of that it drains the battery fast — up to 40% in an hour, several times more than comparable apps.
It crashed twice in the first hour of use and bugged out when routing. Pressing 'back' closes the app more often than not
laggy af, it's so slow at everything or just giving up processes, not rerouting
It ate about 40% of the charge within an hour.
Placing waypoints is painful — the map keeps zooming out
Route-building is clumsy: entering waypoints has to be repeated until the app finally accepts them, and after each one the map zooms back out, forcing you to zoom in again. You can't drag points or edit the route line the way the web app allows.
takes forever to input waypoints, which must be done repeatedly until the app finally accepts input.
nach jedem Wegpunkt die App einfach wieder rauszoomt
an incredibly irritating feature of zooming out every time you add a way point.
Offline map downloads stall and fail
Offline maps are a paid feature, yet even it breaks: downloads are slow, stick at 64–70% and abort, and when they do finish the maps come out pixelated and unreadable. For some premium users downloading stopped working entirely after an update.
Offline downloading is very slow and is often stuck at approx 70 %. After it finished the offline maps were pixelated badly so I wasnt able to read them.
Couldn't download an offline map (due to unknown error), tried 15 times.
on going to premium the offline downloads are very slow. On fast internet they seem to stick at 64% for a while
Relentless 'buy Premium' nagging on every tap
The free version buries users in upgrade banners — the premium prompt pops up on virtually every action and every launch. For many it backfires: instead of wanting to pay, they want to uninstall.
Tap. Want Premium? No thanks... tap. Want Premium? No thanks... tap. Want Premium? No thanks... tap. Want Pre... Uninstall.
Crazy amount of annoying ads for the premium version on the free version - definitely not an approach which convinces me to pay for this app
How do I disable the nagging screen trying to convince me to get the Premium version?