For those of us that have CarPlay, this is a huge improvement. Up until now most CarPlay users were downloading Apps and using them for Navigation. Waze and RV life are just a couple of examples of navigation apps that work with CarPlay.

I have had a decent navigation experience using the Waze App. I like some of its features, such as real time alerts. It works flawlessly with CarPlay and overall a very good App. I feel that the RV life/Trip Wizard Navigation, while it has some good features, was cumbersome. To be quite frank, it needs a lot of work. After using it for nine months and over 5000 miles, our opinion was that it was not worth the price of the subscription. Hopefully in time that changes as it has a huge following. I know the folks at RV Life are working on improvements. To read our review of the RV Life/Trip Wizard App click here.

The absence of MapQuest from CarPlay was always a disappointment to me. It was extremely disappointing when I traded in my 2015 Ram 1500 for the 2020 Ram 2500 and I lost built in navigation functionality; which I believe was Garmin.

So, I have to say; I am thrilled that MapQuest has been added to CarPlay. I’m sure Tammy is even happier, since many times last year we had to have her use IPhone MapQuest app to validate that our CarPlay Navigation App was taking us the correct route (many times it was not). Now obviously, MapQuest has not evolved to the point where it is offering RV friendly routes like some of the other Apps out on the market. However, I have yet to encounter an issue where an App I was using alerted me to something that I would need to avoid. I’m not saying that that is not a nice feature to have, it is. But, I would rather have a good reliable Navigation App like MapQuest, than an unreliable RV friendly App.

So, moving forward I will be using MapQuest with Waze as a back-up. In addition, there are many free Apps that are RV friendly that I can use to pre-check my route just in case. All in All – great news for CarPlay users everywhere.

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I will start by saying the concept of RV friendly navigation is a good one.  There are more navigation systems entering that space now, like Garmin.  The RV life App also provides some nice additional functionality such as campgrounds nearby, fuel stops, rest stops nearby, campground research, RV articles, etc. The RV Life App gives the user many features that would otherwise take multiple apps to achieve. All of these are great additions to a navigation app but accurate and user-friendly navigation is why you buy the app.

However, our experience with the RV Life App has been less than satisfactory:

First and foremost, the App is not what I would consider an integrated solution to travel.  Since Maps are created on the website and then flow to the App it’s really a two-step process.  The development team for RV Life told me that they are working on improvements to this. Also “tentative” trips, those without an active date, do not flow to the App.  I have no idea why they made that decision, that was a mistake in my opinion.

Once the app has the trip details, it defaults the starting location based on your physical location not the specified starting point.  So, if you are looking at your trips and you want to see the miles and hours on different legs of the trip, you can’t do that from the app; you can only do that from their website.  For example, let’s say that you’re sitting at your first campsite and wonder how many miles and hours the third leg of the trip will take. When you open that trip it will use your current location for the starting point; not the starting point you used when you created your trip. That’s very inconvenient.

In addition, we had multiple login issues during the trip. The App did not recognize my account as being active and wanted me to create a new account.  The only way I seemed to remedy this was by going back into the website and logging on there.  Obviously when you are trying to bring up a trip and you can’t login, that’s a big problem.

On the website, creating a trip is not intuitive at all.  The ending location should be on the same screen as the starting location when you create a trip. This is just not a user friendly trip set up process. Again, they (the RV Life Support Team) said they are working to improve this process.

Now for the most disappointing part; some of the RV friendly routes were not RV friendly. We would be taken off a major highway to narrow back roads in terrible shape when the highway would have been faster and safer.  In a few cases we could not figure out where the RV Life directions were trying to take us so we had to ignore them, and default to iPhone MapQuest.

It’s CarPlay ability is sketchy; at least in the 2020 Ram 2500.  I always had to select the trip before I plugged into my USB port on the truck.  I was unable to make the App work otherwise.  If I plugged the iphone in with the App running already, then it would be CarPlay friendly. Trying to get the App to work from CarPlay alone was unsuccessful.

The App needs more user acceptance testing to become a better alternative to Garmin and other Trip apps.  The cost is $50.00 usd per year to access all the features. While that may not be a lot of money, it’s too much for having these kind of issues.  If you pay for a navigation app but need to use mapquest as a backup (as we did many times), that’s a serious issue.

I sent my feedback to the RV Life App support group.  However, their responses to me were less than satisfying and a bit condescending. Hopefully the folks at RV Life look at these issues and try to remedy them. This app has a great deal of potential, and I would like to keep it; but it needs work.

Perhaps your experience has been different, and if it has that is great. There is a lot of positive features to this App if it works the way it should. For now I will probably be back to using mapquest or waze.

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