Various problems with v3.25.1

Hi Menion, this is/was a really strange situation. After uninstalling and reinstalling the app and waiting a while, now I'm back to normal operations.

What I think happed is that when you exclude an app from power savings, it takes a while to become effective. My experiments simply happen too short after changing this setting in Android - at least that's my best guess in hindsight.

As for the screen orientation in the "old" app: I had left it to "system settings" and things were completly strange. I had to fix it to portrait. But now, with the reinstalled app, this problem is also gone.

I know, not a proper explanation, but I'm glad I'm back to operational mode and thanks to the backup manager haven't lost my recorded tracks.

Good day Chris,

I'm glad to read, that you problem is solved now, even if we do not know why.

Because I do not have reported such weird problems, I really hope this was rare case and won't happen again.

Menion

Sorry to get back to you, but so are my problems...

Today I've recorded a 20 min. bike ride and it recorded all the time but only the very starting and ending point. The track was shown as a straight line (as the crow flies).

I have no idea what happened between July 14th and now.

On July 14th I recorded my last track successfully. As usual, started the recording, locked my mobile, put it in my backpack. Everything got recorded fine. When I tried to record my next track a few days ago, nothing worked as usual. No Android updates happened since then, nor did I chance any settings of my mobile.

When was Locus' last update released?

Could something have changed in the recording profiles? What I've noticed in my existing track recordings, they show up with activity type "not specified". The new ones show up with either "bike" or "hike" and the respective icon. What were the profile settings in previous versions?

Thanks...

Good day Chris,

I'm not aware of any changes that may affect recording a track during last few versions (months). What you wrote really looks like some problem with battery optimizations in your device.

If you open left side panel for recording a track, do you see there a warning in blue box? It should not be there!

Also aren't you using any application that try to free memory or somehow optimize your device? It should also affect this behavior. In worst case, I may prepare new version that should at least record if Locus itself stopped recording for some reason.

Thanks Menion for bearing with me...

This is getting more and more mysterious. I'm pretty sure (although not 100%) that I have never excluded Locus from my system's energy savings (for months and months all recordings were fine). Not until I started looking for answers a few days ago and found this forum. Just then I noticed the warning on the track recording screen (see pic #1).

So then I set the energy savings for the app to "disabled" and after a few hours (no idea why it takes so long to propagate thru the Android system) the track recording screen does not display the warning any longer (see pic #2). Still the problems remain.

Have you every heard someting crazy like deteriorating GPS sensors in a mobile device? :-)

I'm completely puzzled...

OK, here's another strange observation I just made:

Despite having excluded Locus from any battery optimizations, Locus still warns me about "power savings" in the track recording screen. (My quick previous tests where the warning was gone were actually made while charging the battery. Duh.) BTW: How does Locus decide wether to print that warning or not? Does it simply look for system-wide energy savings or just for the app itself?

So it looks as if something in Android prevents this exclusion on a per-app basis when to save energy and when not.

Still, the Q remains: Why did it work all those months? I'm using the "medium" level of power savings ever since and the last Android update was in early Jan, 2017 - while my last successful track recording was in min July.

It remains strange...

Hello Chris,

test on battery optimization is made for Locus Map only, not for some system wide settings.

Please really check mainly this settings we wrote in manual. It is main source of troubles.

System Optimizing - settings > battery > battery use > “next” button in topbar > battery use optimization > click on “Apps are not optimized” and select “All apps” and here finally find Locus Map and switch the optimization OFF for it.

Yes, that was one of my first actions. As you can see on the attached screen shot, I have excluded Locus from optimization. However, on the track recording screen, I still see the warning about energy savings being in place. And, experimenting with similar tracking apps, which suffer the same, I assume something's wrong in my Android system. I will focus on this for now and will let you know the outcome, should I ever succeed.

Thanks very much for you time and patience...

Just ran another test with battery savings disabled. All track recordings went fine and successfull. Not a single hiccup, no GPS fix loss, no problems with saving, nothing. All's good.

Since other GPS tracking apps show the same problems when the device is in energy savings mode, I suspect Android (v6.0.1) is simply switching off GPS in this mode once the display gets locked.

In turn, this means that whatever app I set to "do not optimize" is pretty useless, because when the underlying OS is switching GPS off, it's gone. For all apps, wether they're optimizied or not. Period.

I consider this a flaw in Android's energy design and would love the developers to make that an option "when in energy savings mode, keep GPS powered on". Obviously, this is the wrong place for such a request... :-)

Good evening Chris,

my experience over last years ( singe Google and mainly other device manufacturers started to experiment with various battery saving modes ), is that

1. every device act differently
2. most battery saving methods really su**s for apps that needs permanent and continuous work
3. I personally see close to zero benefit in daily life ...

I'm glad you found some combination that works for you. If you discover something that is not included in our manual, I'll really gladly listen and improve it.

There also exists method how to excluded app from power saving options programmatically directly over app and we implemented it maybe year before. Few days after release of updated version, Google wrote us that we have to remove this feature from app because it is not made for apps like Locus Map, otherwise they remove us from Play Store ... so here we are.

I'm really worried what again comes with today coming Android 8 ... hope it won't be worst.

Have a nice evening!

Very good closing words.

Again, thank you very much for bearing with me thru that longish thread.