iOverlander Reviews

Love iOverlander . We just did a 4 day trip from CA to MI and iOverlander was super helpful with finding things like water, ice, showers, and most importantly areas to sleep. I enjoy how everything is crowd sourced so that the information is constantly evolving.

There are really only two things that I think could be a little better. iOverlander , at least when I was using it can’t natively integrate with apple maps, and also the UI just seems a little bit clunky..hard to describe but that’s just how it felt.

Overall an extremely well thought out app that is super useful and will be getting heavy use on my phone/iPad for years to come.

I’ve been using iOverlander for over a year now. The users of iOverlander have submitted many useful locations including dispersed camping locations, campgrounds, water, dump stations, propane, etc...

I’ve never had iOverlander crash and it provides me with great information into the areas I explore.

If you combine this application with other apps and websites, you will have an exceptional method for route/trip planning. I utilize iOverlander for routing purposes to see where I can camp, pick up water, and dump my tanks.

My only gripe is that when I’m adding a location to iOverlander , it never zeros in on my phones gps location precisely. I have an iPhone 11 Pro so I’m not sure what the deal is with that. I often use google maps to find my exact location and then manually add those coordinates into iOverlander when I’m adding a location such as a campsite or free water spigot.

Lastly, people that gripe about the user interface being outdated or what not. I mean yeah, I suppose it is, but at the end of the day I believe people using iOverlander are backcountry campers. Why are you griping about the apps user interface haha. It provides you with essential information, who cares how pretty it is. Take that energy you’re using for nitpicking an app and apply it towards cleaning the trash from the next campsite you’re at and leaving it better than the way you found it.

Good app. Thanks for developing it.

-Dave

Planned a month long road trip expecting to pay for campsites and lodging across America then a friend recommended iOverlander. It was amazing the community that submits spots is helpful and informative and it helped us find spots we never could that were amazing free camp spots. iOverlander is very basic but it’s perfect as it even loads most of the time without service. If you need overnighting spots and recommendations iOverlander is spectacular for that. Will recommend to everyone so the community keeps growing. Keep up the good work!

My fiancé and I went on a month long overland/camping excursion (CO, UT, AZ, NV, CA, OR, WA, MT, WY) and used iOverlander for the majority of our camping sites.

Functions pretty well when cell reception is not the greatest! The review/picture function is perfect and allows you to pick some very excluded and absolutely gorgeous locations and to avoid parking lots and rest areas (unless that's what you are looking for)! We found a spot literally on the edge of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon - our ladder to our RTT was ~10 ft from dropping off the canyon! Would never have found places like this without iOverlander . 10/10, hands down, perfect, etc.

this app is back! iOverlander has been a great resource for my wife and I for over 3 years. I’m blown away by the speed at which the developer responded to so many (including my own) concerns over the last glitch and then how quickly they were able to push an update. Everything is back to working and I can’t wait to continue contributing beautiful sites and staying at others I find via this free app.

There are quite a few apps out there for information about where to stay but frankly this app has worked so well and helping me find not only the “main”, or obvious places to stay, but amazing and accurate about those out of the way or “unlisted” places that you would not know about without iOverlander. After “real world” use for my Vanlife needs, I see no reason to use anything else.

Well done everyone!

Love iOverlander for finding things but useless for me to add new items. My wife and I share the login on two iPhones and she has probably posted a hundred new spots but while they show up for me in the map and list they don’t appear under my checkin history. Where it’s says “missing check ins?” I try to sync from server and the spinning wheel just spins forever. I’ve let it go for an hour and it just spins, never syncs. Reinstalled iOverlander several times. The history shows up when I use the website but not in iOverlander . That makes it very disappointing for me so I’ve been creating listings in a competing app.

I can only speak of my experiences, and I’ve only used iOverlander in my travels in Bolivia and it has been amazing to say the least. Found some GEMS of camping spots I would have never come across (and I am born and bred Bolivian).
Yes iOverlander could use some modernizing and I understand why some would hold back a star because of it, but for a free platform with such great data I just can not give it less than 5 stars. 6 if I could. Some seriously incredible experiences have been made from it.

I just hope it never shuts down. I will donate to keep you guys going!

Some features I’d like:
- Possibility to download certain areas of map
- pin location to check in (too much hassle to find gps coordinates)
- favorite locations for quick access

Great app, love all the useful crowdsourced data.

Could use a UI update to be more modern. Also would love a Favorites section where you could favorite spots you find so you can view them again later. I run in to the issue of planning out where I’m going to camp, use iOverlander to find a spot, then later on when I actually need to navigate to it, I have to go find the spot again which isn’t always easy. So a nice heart button or favorite button would be a very useful addition.

This has been the best app for full time vanlifing/traveling I have found and I recommend it to literally everyone. It’s very simple and easy to use. Takes no data to run so a lot of the time it loads and will work without cell service for me. It takes the questioning out of parking somewhere wondering “will I get kicked out?” You can see how many other people have stayed and what their experience was! Stellar app.

Love iOverlander. We heard about it on the tail end of a five week road trip and it saved us in the Midwest (where there’s not much public land available for easy camping).

Huge request to the developer - let us drop a pin on the map for check-ins because if I don’t add the check-in immediately, it’s too much work for me to go back on Google Maps, pull the GPS coordinates, and then input them manually.

Im really loving iOverlander! Cannot wait to hit the road and enjoy some of these spots. One thing that’s made living in NYC such a dream is the feature in google maps where you can save places you want to go/eat/shop at. If iOverlander had a feature where you could save places you want to go it would make deciding where to go so much easier!!! Again great app!!! Thank you for all your hard work

This was my go to app when we went car camping in summer. After few days, we didn’t even plan ahead. We would just check places to park for the night on iOverlander . iOverlander also helped us find showers and wifi for working. Also the reviews for the locations have been super helpful. Thank you for this.

iOverlander is awesome! Biggest complaint is that a lot of spots are marked as closed, but you don’t know until you click on it - it would be helpful if the color of the pin changed when the spot is marked closed.
It would also be cool if you could save spots you want to try

I’d say about 65% of the sites marked are actually marked CLOSED but you don’t know that until you click on the pin and view the information. Why don’t they either REMOVE closed spaces or at least change the pin color.

Also when you finally find a spot that isn’t closed you have to scrolls down (sometimes 10-12 full phone swipes) to go past every review of the place in order to click on the directions buttons. Would be most helpful to have the links to directions ABOVE all the reviews so you don’t have to scroll like a mad person.

iOverlander is an absolute must have for van life! Can’t tell you the number of times that iOverlander has given us incredible places to stay while we hear of others around us without iOverlander who had to splurge on pricey campgrounds. In months of traveling, we’ve almost never had to pay to spend a night. What would we do without this app?!

Not as slick as other apps, but then again, all the fancy features found on other apps aren’t any good if you aren’t finding any unmarked backcountry spots. Wish the user pool was a little bigger with more camper involvement. But found some awesome spots using it, and it was way easier than using .gov website!

From a quick night stop on the side of the highway to a scenic retreat deep into the woods iOverlander makes sure u know what your getting and shows u some amazing spots.

I would 100% recommend iOverlander for anyone into camping , overland travel / van life , and even just for road trips.

GPS works offline, shows dump stations, cool attractions , water , pretty much everything you need. Super cool u can add stops to and gives users input.

I think in the future it would be pretty cool to link with an app like the dyrt or hipcamp to broaden the amount of established campsites. Maybe see other overlanders to haha

This would be a 5 star review if there were options to use something other than Apple maps as a default.

Yes...we can use Google maps once we find a location we want to travel to, but having Apple maps as the only option when searching for a location totally ruins this otherwise wonderful app.

Apple maps just doesn't cut it.

Full time vanlifer for the past 2yrs, 50% of that time has been travelling. iOverlander has been crucial to the success of my roadtrip, always making it easy to find good spots in cities I've never been before.

If this was a $100 app, it would still be undervalued.

While the UI isn't anything to write home about, what makes iOverlander so great is the community. The amount of user input really is plentiful, which makes it really helpful when trying to decide on places to rest, camp, sleep, etc. I can't imagine doing van traveling without iOverlander.

I love iOverlander, it’s incredibly useful and an absolute lifesaver when it comes to planning. My only issue with it is that it doesn’t work well in dark mode, certain parts of iOverlander are unable to be read (the browse screen in particular).

Text interface at beginning. No design.

Preferences? Oh look: unit of measurement. Hmm it’s on metric (why iOverlander can’t figure this out based on the OS language setting (hint: it’s ENG-us). Can’t change the setting because clicking on it presents a page of a ton of blank lines all in black.

So back to the front carefully designed page of text choices. Let’s click on “nearby”. Wow! Another scrolling page of blank listings all in black with a small icon of a tent on the left. Everything else is blank.

Wonderful execution. Please don’t try to be an app dev. It’s not working. And if this is merely some website wrapped in an app, just don’t. Clicking a few buttons in Xcode does not a programmer make you. Stick to the website and burn this.

It is iOverlander that all "round the world" must have in their tablets or smartphone. Waypoints are added daily by travelers and updated bi-weekly by the developer. Info includes gas station, mechanics, hotel/hotels, campground, wild camping sites, warning of thief/corrupted police seeking bribe, border crossing details, insurance agents, etc.

I put in town, state, coordinates and all I get is Brazil. Have to move map “by hand” to search for places. Once you find the location, lots of great info. Will try to keep using, maybe it can get more responsive.

Used iOverlander everyday in our van trip across Baja, prob would’a died or went to jail with out it! Thanks everyone for the amazing content! I’ve added a lot of helpful spots along the journey!

I am in the US and am specifically interested in recreational vehicle boondocking/wildcamping, so there isn’t yet a large database of points to draw from. I find it very strange that there isn’t a “Grocery Store” category, given all of the other useful and diverse categories.

Great resource but to many locations are simply advertisements for companies or the icon shows camping but it’s really a Home Depot. No one checks accuracy of location marked and reporting them seems useless.

If you like exploring areas less traveled, this is your app. Great job!

Not sure why but every time I click on any icon on the maps iOverlander immediately goes back to my home screen.

Such an amazing resource. Thank you.

Aside from the horrible user interface, this company takes no accountability for the devastation they cause by geotagging wild spaces. Poor app and even worse ethics.