10 best road trip apps for Android
Taking road trips is practically a worldwide pastime. Traveling in a car with some friends (or animals) and seeing the sites can be a great time. As you might have guessed, smartphones can make the experience a little easier and better. There are a lot of different ways to take a road trip. However, we’re confident that these apps can be helpful to almost everyone. Here are the best road trip apps for Android!
Here are some more apps that you might find helpful on your road trip!
Airbnb lets you find a place to stay. It boasts over four million places to stay across 91 countries. It's not a typical hotel/motel app. It includes people who will rent out a room at various rates directly from their house or apartment. There are other hotel/motel apps like Booking.com, HomeAway, Kayak, Agoda, Priceline, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor, and many, many others. They all make great road trips apps. They all help you find a place to sleep during your road trip. Airbnb just has the best worldwide support so we chose that one for the list.
Android Auto turns your device into a dashboard. It offers quick access to things like navigation, messages, music, and other stuff. It works well while driving. That way you spend less time looking at your phone and more time on the road. It supports a variety of apps, including Google Maps, Waze, most popular music apps, most popular chat apps, and more. You need a phone with Android 5.0 or higher, but most people do these days. Some cars even come with this as their center console OS. It's one of the better road trip apps. Drivemode and AutoMate are excellent substitutes as well.
GasBuddy is one of the most excellent road trip apps out there. It allows you to compare gas prices at nearby and upcoming gas stations. It features a community of over 70 million people. The app crowd-sources gas prices from them. Thus, the prices you see are ones that people posted. You can also help out and change a price if one is wrong. Finding good gas prices is going to be a valuable road trip skill until electric cars become the norm. GasBuddy does that really well.
GPS Speedometer and Odometer is what the name says. It uses your phone's GPS to calculate your speed and distance traveled. This is great for a number of reasons. You can see total distance traveled, your average speed, and all kinds of other stats. It also works offline for those areas with no mobile signal. The free version of the app contains ads. The pro version for $1.10 does not. Otherwise, they both work the same way.
Lonely Planet is a collection of city guides. It features fun facts about monuments and landmarks, tons of information about various cities and their cultures. Additionally, it features offline maps, recommendations, audio phrasebooks with 19 languages supported, and bookmarks. It's definitely among the more useful road trip apps. The design is also quite nice and the app includes information on over 100 cities worldwide.
Make your road trip more special with these excellent apps!
Google Maps is probably the best navigation app out there. It features support for most countries around the world. The app also gives you information about local businesses, traffic updates, and even transit schedules. That is on top of the usual stuff like turn-by-turn navigation. Google Maps also lets you download maps for temporary offline use. That can be helpful for those parts of your trip with no web connection. HERE WeGo Maps is another excellent option for road trips apps as well.
Traveling to unfamiliar territory is difficult sometimes. Especially during road trips. Those looking for a place to park or camp for the night have a good option with this app. It supports North America (Canada, U.S., and Mexico). The app includes privately owned and public parks, U.S. military campgrounds, and RV-friendly parking lots. The CampWiki family of apps performs a similar function, but with a few extra countries supported. There may also be apps for individual countries as well. These are musts for road trip apps.
Splitwise is an app for expenditure tracking. Going on road trips with friends is great. However, money is evil and can ruin a good time. An app like Splitwise can keep everyone honest. You can use it to split pretty much any expenditure so that everyone is pitching in what they're supposed to. No need for arguments or a paper or pencil, or someone forgetting about the $15 in gas you totally paid for during the last pit stop. This one looks nice, it's easy to use, and it's relatively inexpensive.
Waze is another navigation app. It crowd-sources traffic data in real-time. Thus, travelers can see where the road blocks, cops, traffic accidents, and other obstacles might be. This may not be so great out on the country side where traffic is generally relaxed. However, going into a new city during your road trip can definitely be challenging. Google Maps and Here WeGo may be better overall for road trips, but Waze is an excellent option when you're hitting Chicago at five o'clock in the evening during rush hour.
Entertainment during road trips is tough. You can play Punch Buggy, I Spy, or listen to music. Since the two former options get old really fast, listening to music is probably going to be the bulk of your road tripping entertainment. Some good options include Spotify, Pandora, Google Play Music, Apple Music, Tidal, and others. You have plenty of options to choose from. It's also very likely that you're already using one. They provide a virtually limitless supply of music. You don't have to carry around CDs or fill up your phone storage with local files. Most include offline playlist downloads for those times when data isn't available. Usually they go for around $9.99 per month.
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If we missed any great road trip apps, tell us about them in the comments! You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists!
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