Off-board, cloud based cell phone GPS navigation takes around 1 to 15 megs per trip, with wide variation based on pre-caching, length of route, and other unknown factors.
A limited test on iOS shows Apple Maps and Google Maps to both have under 0.5 megabyte data usage for most navigation steps.
It seems on iOS, Apple Maps has a less data usage compared to Google Maps. However, it is not a large enough difference, in my opinion, to affect most users.
Scout by Telenav has consistently higher usage, but again it is debatable if over a month if it would add up to enough to affect any users.
The main item to note is if a user wants to save mobile data usage, preplanning and letting system precache data while on a WiFi connection is a worthwhile way to save a megabyte or two of data usage per trip.
Details:
I could not find test results with data for relative data usage of various off-board / cloud based GPS navigation phone applications.
I did find some comments listing single trial results and a couple study results.
The study was from Onavo, maker of a data usage counting app.
They compared Apple maps in iOS 6 (vector based) and Google Maps on iOS (bitmap based).
"... series of activities on Google Maps and Apple Maps that included searching for several US cities, addresses and airports and zooming in and out to locate specific locations.
...
On Google Maps, the average data loaded from the cellular network for each step was 1.3MB. Apple Maps came in at 271KB – that’s approximately 80% less data."
My results do not show Google as data heavy. One possible reason is the different amount of road traffic information at the different tested locations.
Onavo's test was redone in UK and France by MacWorld.AU.
Again, no raw data was shared.
My desire was for data based in US market, with enough trials that the data results have some degree of stability.
My own tests have not reached that level. However, I thought them good to share. Maybe they can be a basis or example for further study.
I think this might be a good project for a science fair project or lab course.
Raw Data: off board app data usage 2013-12-02a.xls
Converted:
off board app data usage 2013-12-02a.ods
off board app data usage 2013-12-02a.csv
Acknowledgements:
This preliminary study was sponsored by my employer, AW Technical Center U.S.A., Inc. http://awtcus.com/products
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