Offline Navigation Apps for Android: What Survives No Signal

My phone was at 3% somewhere past the last exit on the interstate last week. The data had finished first, and the junction ahead was doing that thing rural junctions do, where three roads pretend to be one. The driver said he knew this road. He did not know this road.

That is the kilometre this page is for: data gone, signal shy, the only guide left lives on your phone. I test on my phone, and every figure below was read off the live page it names on 15 November 2026.

Only one of these apps will tell you how old its map is. The rest keep you guessing.

The radio-off bar: test before you trust any of these

The fear underneath every offline-map question is simple. Your hire's car stops at a junction, your phone shows nothing, and nobody in the car is sure of the way. The fix is a phone held in airplane mode, checked while you still have signal, before the trip that matters.

Google does not publish the list of countries where offline maps refuse to download. Its help page prints the refusal itself. "You can't download offline maps in some countries or regions because of contractual limitations, language support, address formats, or other reasons."

HERE's offline maps help prints the page's named exemptions (it says "such as", so it is not a closed list). Neither page names West Africa as exempt.

You need to be signed in to Google Maps before you can download offline maps. On a shared family phone, that matters more than the app does.

The test costs one minute and no bundle. Google Maps, tap your profile picture, Offline maps, Select your own map. Pan to the county your trip crosses, read the size above the Download button, and tap Download. If it downloads, the road works offline. If it refuses, no page on the internet will save you at a dark junction.

The four picks, one at a time

Free, fresh, deep or familiar. Every install link below is the store page itself.

Google Maps, the one already on your phone

Who it is for: you, if you drive for the school run or the okada, and you want the map that opens first.

What it does: download an area, and driving directions keep working with the radio off. Transit, bicycling and walking directions stop. Traffic info and alternate routes stop. The whole route has to sit inside the rectangle you drew, in Google's own words, and Google's listing was updated on 12 November 2026.

What it costs: nothing. Play prints "Contains ads" and 10B+ downloads. Google prints no lifespan for offline maps. It only tries to auto-update an area once fewer than 15 days remain, and the listing prints no expiry at all. Change the save location from internal storage to an SD card, and the help page prints: you download the map again.

One free trick hides inside it. Start navigating while you still have signal, and Maps holds the route until you arrive or close the app, bundle or no bundle. Android Authority documented it in April 2025. It works on a phone that never downloads a rectangle.

Organic Maps, the only one that dates its map

Who it is for: walkers, cyclists and hikers, and anyone who wants the map's age in writing before they trust it.

What it does: 100% offline maps built on OpenStreetMap, free forever. Play prints unlimited map downloads, refreshed twice a month. The what's-new note on the listing updated 29 September 2026 prints "OSM data as of September 28, Wikipedia as of September 21". No other app on this page prints a data date anywhere.

What it costs: nothing. Its store form says "No data collected", the cleanest declaration of the four. Contour lines, Outdoor and Hiking layers ship free, and Android Auto is supported free. It is only as current as OpenStreetMap, which is exactly where the coverage gaps below come from.

OsmAnd, seven downloads and a wallet

Who it is for: the driver who wants trails, contour lines and GPX tracks, beyond the expressway rectangle.

What it does: the deepest toolkit of the four: offline navigation, OpenStreetMap data, GPX import, vehicle profiles. The free tier on Android gives you seven map downloads. Every download spends one. A map update counts as a download, and deleting the map does not refund the slot.

What it costs: free to install with in-app purchases, listing updated 18 October 2026. Its own documentation puts the limit at 5 on iOS and 7 on Android. Run dry, and the payments help page promises three more downloads for anyone who joins their list. Monthly updates land with a two-day delay; hourly updates are Pro.

Prices on OsmAnd's purchase page today: Maps+ at $14.99 a year or $69.99 once, OsmAnd Pro at $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Topo lines are paid in OsmAnd. In Organic Maps they are free.

MAPS.ME, free to install, subscription inside

Who it is for: you, if you want an instant-opening map and you keep fewer than ten regions.

What it does: the whole world offline, fast, on the same OpenStreetMap data. The free tier covers the common ground. More than ten map regions needs the Pro subscription, per the OpenStreetMap wiki page for MAPS.ME. The Android listing was updated 14 September 2026. Convexity Holdings AG, Switzerland, is the developer of record. Nowhere on the page is a map data date printed.

What it costs: free to install. Play prints in-app purchases, no ads label, 50M+ downloads. The store page will not tell you your price, so read it inside the app before you commit.

Nigeria: where the free maps go quiet

The OpenStreetMap community keeps the list itself, naming the areas where Mapbox and Bing show roads and the map does not. The five: west and northwest parts of Lagos, northwest parts of Abuja, many roads around Port Harcourt, western part of Ibadan, around Calabar. That is the community's list, not my guess.

Organic Maps, OsmAnd and MAPS.ME inherit those gaps, because all three ship OSM data. Google's rectangle draws from Google's own data. My guess is it holds up more often on those roads, and no page prints that. The five cities are exactly the cities a Nigerian driver enters on a normal week.

The tagging rules bite here too. OSM assumes every road from motorway down to unclassified is paved unless a mapper adds a surface tag. In August mud, that paper definition becomes a grammar lesson in suspension failure. Nigeria's Federal Highways Act prints E.1 as the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, so a route number can be right while the road itself is missing.

OSM's page also begs directly for street names: "Street names and POIs are heavily needed." Your pin may exist without the house number. Ask the customer for the landmark, not the address, and they will still describe the yellow shop with the dead generator.

The one app sitting on Play for "offline map Nigeria" tells on itself. Its store form prints 5K+ downloads, contains ads, updated 10 September 2026, "Data isn't encrypted", and shares Device or other IDs with third parties. The developer is in Sri Lanka. Skip it; the big four do the job.

How many regions can you keep, and is the map lying?

Here is the straight answer, one line each. Google Maps: as many rectangles as you can draw, no published cap, each one an area you size on screen. Organic Maps: unlimited. OsmAnd free: seven on Android, updates spend them, deletion refunds nothing, plus three more if you join the list. MAPS.ME: ten, and beyond that is Pro. HERE WeGo: no cap published, downloads grouped by continent. That grouping fits cross-border drives, and HERE WeGo is free on Play.

App	Data date printed	Free keep-limit	Off the grid
Google Maps	None	No cap published	Driving-only; whole route inside the download
Organic Maps	Yes: "OSM data as of September 28"	Unlimited	Car, walking, cycling, hiking
OsmAnd free	No; a counter instead	7 on Android	Car, walk, bike; free tier includes online map sources
MAPS.ME	None	10 regions	Driving, walking, cycle
HERE WeGo	No	No cap published	Needs a "Use app offline" toggle in the menu

Is the map lying to you? Only on the missing-roads list above, and only there. Everywhere else, treat the map as last month's memory of the road, because that is what OSM is. For the estate gate that appeared in March, every map on this page is clueless.

The hiker's lane, honestly

For the parent hiking with the child who insists the hill is right there, Organic Maps ships free contour lines and a Hiking layer. OsmAnd puts Topography data behind Maps+ and Pro. The serious hiking rigs abroad are paid topo subscriptions, so the free contours are what a phone gets.

The verdict, one reader at a time

• City driving: Google Maps rectangle downloaded on Wi-Fi the night before. Traffic dies offline; the road holds.
• Long rural corridors: Google for the freeway, Organic Maps for the turn-offs it misses.
• The motorbike courier: Organic Maps, because walking directions survive the handoff when the customer's phone drops the call at the gate.
• The car-hire reader: both phones download the same rectangle. The passenger's phone is the co-pilot nobody asked for.
• The driver: "I know this road", he says, with the calm of a man who has been lost on it twice.
• The cross-border run: WeGo's continent grouping, or two Google rectangles, one per side of Seme, downloaded before the border queue.
• The hiker: Organic Maps, free contours, no card required.

Before you leave the house

• Charge the phone. GPS running in the background eats battery fast, MAPS.ME's own listing warns exactly that, and it applies to all four.
• Download on Wi-Fi the night before, never on a roaming SIM.
• Rename the maps: "Dallas to Waco", "Office lot", not "Map 3".
• Run the airplane-mode test once on the actual gate road.
• In OsmAnd, open Menu, Download maps, and read the counter (it says "Free version. X downloads left") before you rage-quit at seven.
• When the bundle dies mid-trip, a one-minute pin check still works on any balance.
• WhatsApp pins from the passenger's phone are the cheapest fallback on earth.

What to do next

Download the Google rectangle for your most-travelled route today, then install Organic Maps and run the same gate road in airplane mode. If your bundle is the real problem, the low data apps list covers the other half of the journey.

My Android problems hub collects the fix set, from GPS confusion to storage that will not free itself.