We developed this app as our physical race events when from a good number a year to ZERO overnight due to the pandemic situation. We decided to write a little app for us to be able to facilitate virtual races by GPS.
We process the GPS data from your mobile phones and plot a map to get the distance / time etc all the data required to run a race. As of the time of writing this blog, this app has around 150,000km recorded on it. It produces great results for the vast majority of participants if they have configured the phone to some recommended settings. Them most important one is to disable battery saving mode, otherwise the phone forces the app to go to sleep after some time which stops the GPS data logging resulting in an incomplete map.
Above is the phone that goes to sleep, which results in a map with very few data points.
Map of a phone with the recommended settings
Our app doesn't do much, as you can see from the download size from the google play store it is tiny, <2 Mb. All the number crunching is done on our servers. The app is just a means to log the GPS coordinates, as such if the phone goes to sleep it would result in an inaccurate map.
It is very difficult to buy every phone on the market, however the ones we have found which have the most aggressive battery saving modes that forces the app to sleep are the Huawei and Honor range of phones. Followed by RedMi, and a very interesting NEFFOS phone from TPLink which we have yet to get our hands on.
We have produced a guide for the common phone brands but we are constantly on the lookout for new phone brands, if you would like to send us some screen shots do get in touch, we will send you a handy waist pouch so you can run with your phone. Do get in touch via our contact form.
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