Follow these tips to minimise battery usage when navigating with the app.

The biggest draws on battery life are your screen and your phone network. By using each one less, you can navigate for hours more.

Minimising screen use

To reduce screen use, tap the Settings button, then App settings, and select Dim between turns. This will dim the screen to minimum brightness between turns. The screen will automatically light up on the approach to a turn. At any time, tap the screen to restore the brightness.

To absolutely minimise screen use, first make sure voice instructions are turned on: tap the Settings button, then App settings, then make sure Announcements is set to Spoken. Then, when navigating, use your phone’s sleep/side button to turn the screen off. cycle.travel will continue to give you spoken directions even though the screen is off.

Navigating offline

Once you’ve planned your route, you can navigate entirely offline (i.e. without internet connection) to save battery.

Download your planned routes to your phone by tapping the Routes button and finding the route you want. Then:

• On Android, long-press the route (hold your finger down) and select Download from the menu that appears.
• On iPhone, swipe the route to the right, and tap the blue download arrow.

The route is now downloaded to your phone and can be opened at any time, even without internet access.

Next, download the basemap for the area you’re cycling in. Tap the Settings button then Offline map. Tap the areas you want to download, and then tap Download. The basemap for these areas will be downloaded. Note that you can only use the cycle.travel/Wayfarer maps offline, and not any other maps such as Ordnance Survey or OpenStreetMap.

With both your route and the basemap downloaded to your phone, you can now put it in airplane mode and navigate without internet access.

Is the cycle.travel app using GPS in the background?

Only if you’re currently navigating on a route. If you don’t have a route open, GPS will not be used in the background.

On Android, you might still see a notification saying “cycle.travel is using your location to navigate”. This is an artefact of the way that Android works, but in fact cycle.travel isn’t using your location unless you’re navigating on a route.