Navigraph Hub is absurdly buggy

[piedmonitor]

I am a long time Navigraph customer and am a huge fan of your products and services. I appreciate what you do for the sim community and our hobby would be worse if you were not in business.

That being said, in the MSFS era the product that gives me the most consistent heartburn is the Navigraph Hub. It is absurd that it still is as buggy as it is given how central it is to your product line and how straightforward a task it is accomplishing.

Updating my navdata today took me the better part of a half hour and involved closing and reopening the app four times.

At least half the time when I click “UPDATE” the button flips to “INSTALL” instead of “REMOVE”. Then, a significant percentage of the time when I then click “INSTALL” it flips quickly to “REMOVE” but then back to “INSTALL” until I close the app, reopen it, and click install. Sometimes clicking “UPDATE” goes immediately into the same cycle where the button flashes to “REMOVE” but then immediately back to “UPDATE”.

Then there is the TFDi MD-11 navdata that still takes forever to download and install and sometimes freezes the app for me to force close.

I also still don’t understand why Fenix has to be on it’s own tab. Why do I, as the end user, care whether or not it’s installed externally to the simulator? As of today it’s the only one and I own most, if not all, of the major addons for MSFS 2020. It seems like a meaningless distinction and a UX pain point to have to remember to go over to its standalone tab to update it.

And, finally, how do we still not have an “Update All” button? Or an automatic update? I see value in letting people update individual add-ons if they want, but I would guess that a solid 75% of users just go in every month to fight with the app to update everything. I don’t understand why I would not want the option to update the navdata silently when the cycle changes over, I get no value out of updating each addon one by one.

I’m not interested in troubleshooting help, I’ve followed steps provided previously for some of these bugs – full clean uninstallation, reinstallation, etc. – and the app’s general level of bugginess has never meaningfully improved. I am just asking you to please put some of your development time into focusing on making this part of your product less painful.

[flyme60]

I have exactly the same issues as you mentioned here…word for word. Updating to 2502 today took me about 45min and multiple closing and signing out and in of the app. The worst offender always seems to be TFDI MD-11, followed by Fenix. No trouble updating AIRAC itself or PMDG. Totally agree there should be an Update All button or better still automatic update.

[Darrian]

Exactly the same issues here…

[NAVDataOld]

Hi guys,
This is a short note about the TFDi MD-11 dataset and why the installation takes so long. The dataset contains over 95,000 files, most of them very small files. That’s a lot and not very good for all our systems but it was designed by TFDi in this way.

The package downloads fast, nearly everywhere (okay, depending on your internet connection). But then, the Hub decompresses the package in a temp folder—so it decompresses nearly 100,000 files and copies them to your system. After the decompression, these 100,000 files are copied into the correct folder structure.

You can try this procedure on your own. Copy and paste the folder tfdidesign-aircraft-md11\Data\Primary from your community folder somewhere else on your system. Measure the time; you will see that it takes quite a long time. This is, sadly, a TFDi design issue because no other dataset contains so many files.

According to the Fenix dataset, that must go fast because it´s only one file (and two other small JSON files). So, that is something else on your system. We may activate extended logging, but I´m not the person responsible for this on our team.

Cheers,
Richard

[m4rkus]

Hi @piedmonitor,

You’re right in highlighting the importance of the Hub in the Navigraph ecosystem, and that it needs an overhaul in both UX and functionality.

We are aware, and there is a new version of the Hub in the works. It’s a significant effort, as it will not be an incremental update of the current version — we’re rethinking the entire experience where all of the pain points you’ve described are being addressed in the new design. This includes a proper “Update All” experience via a download queue, eliminating the need for manual updates across add-ons. The underlying technology will also be replaced with more modern frameworks, and the codebase will be entirely rewritten to resolve the stability issues you’ve encountered in the current version. There are many edge cases to consider in order to arrive at a scalable solution that will take height for specific add-on requirements as well as responding to the changes that happens in the simulators.

The separate tab for Fenix is such an edge case which will be handled better in the future. This is due to how the current Hub is structured internally. Each MSFS tab (we support both the Store and Steam versions, and both MSFS 2020 and 2024) corresponds to the individual simulator directories where updates are applied. The Fenix navdata, however, is installed externally in a central location—so one update applies to all simulator installations. While this may feel unintuitive if you only have one simulator, it stems from a technical distinction in the current implementation. And I agree with you this is a detail that the user shouldn’t have to think about. Addressing it requires a rewrite of the update logic, one of the many motivations behind the complete rebuild.

In summary, we are committed to provide a better Hub experience. A part of that is a recent organizational change resulting in a dedicated team for products that are close to the simulator where the continued development of products like Hub and Simlink will recieve
more focus going forward.

Thank you for your patience in this matter.

Kind regards,

Markus