All I’m saying really is that we should hold people/organisations that charge for a service (as ABPR does) to similar standards we are used to from say Apple/Google. At the very least I hope it encourages the developers to do better (no pun intended).
Yeah I do agree on that and I’ve said as much to them in feedback and on their own forums - ie. that when they were purely just a hobbyist organisation it was reasonable to expect people to be much more forgiving about bugs etc. But now that at least some of the users are paying customers, and have been a while now, they are rightly going to be held to a higher standard. In their defence though, I’m guessing the lack of travel last year especially probably set things back a bit - with less paying users than would otherwise have been expected, and therefore reduced ability to invest in improving and developing the product.
I guess also I see it as two separate things - the EV specific route planning/monitoring aspect (which is all it ever user to do when I started using it), and then the navigation / CarPlay aspect.
For the intelligent, accurate EV route planning side of things, there is nothing that comes close to it (well, I suppose
EV Navigation is slowly closing the gap a little). So in that respect, ABRP is technically better than the others (the others being the super basic planners in apps like PlugShare). As far as I know, even many Tesla owners make regular use of it because the Tesla planner is only available is you are sat in the car, and can’t do stuff like waypoints.
Once you’ve got it set up properly, especially if you are able to use it with live data from the car, and have the premium weather etc, then it’s scarily accurate. For me, it eliminates the need for any thought or potential for anxiety about range etc - even when conditions turn very wet and windy.
Most of the issues with it from my perspective are that it lacks a lot of polish, can be occasionally buggy still and relies heavily on third parties for charger data and stuff like info about road closures - and that isn’t always going to be up to the second accurate. So I just don’t rely on it for those things.
The navigation aspect of it is a sideshow as far as I’m concerned. I’ll often add several waypoints (and/or guidepoints too) to force it to calculate based on a particular route I want to follow. In other words, I sometimes use it to plan out and then monitor the EV consumption for the route that I want to take, rather than letting it pick the route.
On the sharing of routes, worth pointing out that currently at least you can share a complete route to Google Maps (ie. with various way points), but you can only share the next destination in the plan to Apple Maps or Waze. I think that’s a limitation of Apple and Waze though - which is a shame because Apple Maps really has improved hugely and is now my preferred navigation app.
