PerliNav: Self-Hosted Maps

PerliNav is a navigation app for Irish roads that shows its working — and that runs on a routing server you provide.

READ THIS FIRST
PerliNav has no map service of its own behind it. It talks to a PerliNav routing server that you point it at in Settings, on your own machine or a host you run. There is a demo mode so every screen works before you have one, and it stays labelled as simulated the whole time it is on, because a straight-line fake route presented as a real one is worse than no app at all. Without a server, PerliNav will not route you.

Routing is available in Ireland only (for now).

TWO ETAs, ALWAYS TOGETHER
• Usually — the time the drive normally takes
• Arrive by — the later time you can actually promise somebody
One number hides the difference between a good day and a bad one. Two do not.

THE SANITY SLIDER
Fastest at one end, sanest at the other. Move it and the route changes and both ETAs change with it. It is your handle on the trade-off: the shortcut down the back road that a speed-limit router believes is quicker, and usually is not.

WHY THIS WAY
The router's own reasoning is put on the route card instead of buried in a menu. A router that disagrees with the one in your pocket has to explain itself.

DRIVING
• Turn-by-turn with spoken guidance, a volume you set, and the screen kept awake
• Car, van and truck profiles
• A live traffic overlay and incident reports, when your server publishes them
• Report an incident by voice, so you never take a hand off the wheel. It uses Android's own speech recognition, and the buttons always work without it.
• Standard, terrain and satellite basemaps, from free and open tile sources, each credited on the map
• Street-level imagery from Mapillary, if you add your own free Mapillary key
• Download map regions for use with no signal. That caches map tiles only — the router is a server, so routing still needs one.

LOCATION, EXACTLY
• While you are using the app, PerliNav asks for precise location. That is what turn-by-turn is. Grant coarse only and you still get a usable map.
• Your position and your searches go to the routing server you configured, to get a route and to find places. If your own geocoder is unreachable, a search can fall back to the public OpenStreetMap search service, which receives the words you typed and roughly where you are — never your route, and never a trip.
• Ads come from Google AdMob: one banner at the foot of Settings, never on the map or while driving. The ad SDK never gets your GPS position, routes or places. Nothing about where you go is sold or profiled.
• Guidance runs in a foreground service with a notification, so a long drive is not killed mid-route and you can always see when location is in use.

BACKGROUND LOCATION IS OPT-IN AND SEPARATE
Sharing traffic data is the only reason PerliNav ever asks for background location, and it asks only after a screen that spells out what is sent. Nothing is collected until you accept — not even into a buffer on the phone — and everything else in the app works if you never do.
• Sent: timestamped positions while driving, with speed, heading and GPS accuracy, a trip identifier thrown away and regenerated each trip, and which vehicle profile you picked
• Not sent: no name, no email address, no phone number, no advertising identifier
• The first and last 500 metres of every trip are withheld on the handset, so a trace never leaves your front door or arrives at your workplace
• Uploads wait for Wi-Fi by default; on mobile data the trace just waits
• A notification runs the whole time sharing is active. Pause or switch it off from there or from Settings — switching it off deletes whatever is still queued.

HOW IT IS PAID FOR
PerliNav is free, paid for by that one banner. No purchases, no subscription. You sign in with Google, used for sign-in only.

Feature-usage counting stays on the phone, and you can switch it off.

Made in Ireland by Perlicom Systems Limited.
Support: [email protected]