Keeping Your Journeys Recording on Android

The short version: Android sometimes stops apps that are working in the background, to save battery. If that happens during a journey, recording can silently stop and part of your route goes missing. A few phone settings — listed below — tell Android that Mobility Mapper is allowed to keep working, and they make a big difference.

This page is for Android phones. iPhones manage background apps differently and don't need any of these settings.

What's going on?

To make your battery last, Android keeps a close eye on apps that work while your screen is off or while you're using something else. If it decides an app isn't important, it slows the app down or stops it completely — without telling you.

Recording a journey is exactly the kind of background work Android likes to stop. And because the app has been stopped, it can't warn you at the time — you only find out at the end, when some or all of your route is missing.

This isn't unique to Mobility Mapper. Fitness and navigation apps such as Strava and Komoot have exactly the same problem, and some phone makers — Samsung especially — are stricter than standard Android. (Frustrated app developers run a whole website about it, dontkillmyapp.com.) Google's own apps avoid it only because Google makes Android.

What Mobility Mapper does to protect your journey

While recording, the app shows an ongoing "Recording journey" notification. This tells Android the work matters and mustn't be stopped.
Before you can start a journey, the app checks the battery settings most likely to cause trouble and helps you fix them.
Your journey is saved on your phone as you go and uploads when you have signal — you don't need internet or Wi-Fi while recording.
Coming in the next update: if recording stops for any reason, you'll get a notification within a few minutes. Tap it and the app reopens, rescues everything recorded up to that point, and carries on.

What you can do

Set battery use to "Unrestricted". Open your phone's Settings → Apps → Mobility Mapper → Battery → choose Unrestricted. This is the single most important setting — the app will also prompt you if it isn't set.
Don't swipe the app away while recording. Closing the app from the recent-apps screen stops recording on most phones. Use the Pause or Stop buttons in the app instead — you can safely switch to other apps or lock your phone.
Allow notifications, so the app can alert you if something goes wrong.
Turn off Power Saving mode while recording. Power Saving slows down GPS for every app.
On Samsung phones: also add Mobility Mapper to "Never sleeping apps" — Settings → Battery → Background usage limits → Never sleeping apps. And check it hasn't ended up in the "Sleeping apps" list on the same screen.
Glance at your notifications now and then on long journeys. If the "Recording journey" notification has disappeared, open the app again — it will pick up where it can.

If it happens anyway

Open the app and stop the journey normally — everything that was recorded is kept and uploaded. If a journey looks shorter than it should be, this is almost always the reason, and we can usually see exactly what happened from the journey's diagnostics — contact us at support@mobilitymapper.co.uk and we'll take a look.

Thank you for helping build a wheelable network.