Review: ‘Christchurch’ and ‘Wellington’ by dubbele.com

Hmmm... Where to go for dinner?

Now here’s a curious couple of apps — dubelle.com produce a series of apps they call “Mobile City Maps” which are essentially cached maps of many world cities, each city sold individually, with POI information such as restaurants and museums. Priced at $1.29 each, I thought I would check out ‘Christchurch‘ and ‘Wellington‘ to see if the price of the app was worth the potential savings on data charges.

Christchurch CBD

Upon opening Christchurch, the user is presented with a map of the city. Zooming and panning is similar in technique to Google Maps, however this is where the similarities end. The maps themselves are – how can I put this politely? – ‘minimalist’. The closest I could zoom in is pictured above, which is almost forgiveable, however I found that once I had scrolled beyond the ‘four aves’ of the Christchurch CBD, street names were no longer present which are kind of, you know, the point of a map.

Where the streets have no name

I hit the little red icon you see at the lower-right of the screenshots to bring up the POI info and tested whether it would at least show me the location of one of these un-named streets but no – no results found. Next I thought I would try some POI basics so hit ‘restaurants’ and it returned with just two results. At first I thought it was showing me just the results for the part of town I was in, so I zoomed right out and did it again – still two restaurants.

Somewhat dismayed, I fired up the Wellington app. Again, we have many unnamed streets and this time just one restaurant. One.

Spoilt for choice

I returned to the App Store and re-read the app description. “A complete street level map” it said. “Lets you find all streets.”

Beginning to wonder whether I was doing something wrong, I contacted the author of the app. He explained that he has plans to further develop the apps but that he is “fully dependent on the data on Openstreetmap.org”. Ah, now things are starting to make sense. The apps are an implementation of an open-source community-efforts project. While I have no objection to such apps existing, I do think the author should have thought twice before charging for these in their current state, and should have been a bit more honest with his product description as with all the goodwill in the world they are not fit for purpose and I pity anybody (especially tourists, who are clearly the target market) who pays for these.

Is there any hope for these apps? Well as the author says, all hope rests with openstreetmap.org. “Perhaps your article can get some people together for a ‘mapping party’ and extend the available data quite a bit” he suggests… I’ll bring the beers.

Look, I don’t doubt the author’s intentions to release a useful app, and I’m sure that in cities where openstreetmap.org is a lot more developed like London and New York the corresponding app is worth every cent, but I do think the Christchurch and Wellington apps should have been ‘sanity checked’ before submitting to Apple.

Have you tried any of these apps for other cities? Do you have any suggestions for better destination guides (for NZ)? Get commenting to let us know!