Paperless Geocaching for ANDROID phones

I originally wrote this guide several years ago and while the principles are still similar some aspects have improved considerably.

I wanted to write this guide specifically for modern phones running the Android operating system. The excellent ZTE Blade (Orange San Francisco), which can be bought new for £100. See below for more details.

About Android
Android is developed by Google. It is a relatively new O/S and is fast overtaking all of it's competitors, including Apple's iOS. The ethos is to remain open and Google are therefore much less controlling than their competitors. Anyone can submit applications to the Market (where apps are downloaded directly to the device) and the vast majority of apps are free (unlike other stores).

Geocaching Applications
I must state that I do not use my phone for navigation. I use a dedicated handheld Garmin because it has a better receiver, batteries aren't an issue, it is rugged/waterproof. This means that I cannot comment properly on the navigation side of the apps. The majority of times I use data from a gpx file, rather than live data. This saves data usage, means I don't need a 3G signal and I also get all the logs rather than the last n logs.

The official app from Geocaching.com. I find this good for occassional online lookup (i.e. has a cache been disabled very recently), though it is very much a work-in-progress (which is outrageous for the price). I can't search on cachename, though nearest caches and place name are very useful. While you can view log photos you can't easily see only photos on the listing page (often spoliers) which would be very useful. Very handy for checking the mission of trackables. I would not purchase this app until you have tried some others.

Geocaching.com's close stance is not in our best interest.
In the world of programming a third party software developer would normally pull data direcly from the database via an API (application programmers interface). That is to say he would have a libraruy of functions available to him. An example would be that he could request listing details of a cache by providing the GC code, another would be that he could log a find by providing the GCcode, text, date and username/id. Groundspeak refuse to make their API available to others, so they are really forcing everyone to use their app or use an app which contravenes their terms and conditions. Without the API other developers are forced to screen scrape. This means that behind the scenes the app pulls the whole page from geocaching.com and then extracts the details before presenting them in a reformatted way to the user. This obviously means you have a higher data usage and it's going to be slower. On top of this the app is likely to break eack time gc.com make changes to the layout of their pages.

Geocaching.com are not an open organisation. They don't allow other software to query their data directly

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