My BMW Navigator VI is possessed

[Pyrrho]

We are getting it from all sides.  The BMW Connected app is not nearly as good as Apple Car Play.  The Garmin GPS's are unreliable.  It's a good thing we (mostly) know where we are going.

Ain't that the truth. That said, and as a technophile, I will still take the Garmin over the rest, especially a map. Too much added functionality on top of navigation. Best recommendation? As a backup, get a good cellular data plan and use Google when in service, and when not use an app with downloadable maps like CoPilot.

You can download offline maps in Google Maps. Having used a Nav6 as well as the ConnectedRide cradle & app for several thousand miles... the Garmin is a far better riding companion IMO, the information presented is more useful and easy to access (and there's a LOT more of it).

While the Garmin is physically buggy, the app has issues reliably reconnecting to the bike to the point where I have to restart the bike, the phone, etc to get things talking to each other. At some point last weekend my Pixel 6 worked in cradle mode and was paired to the bike (showing phone battery status on the bike's TFT) but the bike wouldn't connect to the app to display nav & speed data on the TFT. Had to tell the bike and phone to forget each other, reinstalled the app and reset its settings, repair and re-set everything up to get things working again. Things got weird when I upgraded from Android 12 to 13 two weeks ago and hopefully this "reset" will make things more reliable moving forward.

TL;DR - it feels like a kludge. Bikes at this price point should have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto built-in.