FAQ

General

I found a bug, can you fix it?

Of course we can. In fact, we encourage you to report bugs because it helps us to make a better app. What we ask you though is to report errors as detailed as you can (i.e. in what circumstances the error occurres, if you recently updated your phone, which operating system version you have, et cetara) so it's easier to locate the error.

Can you translate the app to French/Spanish/...?

Well, we would like to but we only have people that know English, Czech, Swedish and German at our disposal. If you would like to contribute a translation to a new language we will gladly accept it, though.

Does your app exist on other platforms?

Android: Yes; Blackberry: Yes (QNX 2.1 or better); iOS: Not right now; Ubuntu Phone: Not right now; Windows Phone: No.

Instead of porting, can't you make a HTML5-based app?

Well, do you want an HTML5-based app with a bunch of features stripped away? Didn't think so ;-).
Despite what web designers will make you believe, HTML5 apps are not quite on par with real native applications, yet. You can do a lot of stuff, but background services still have to be written natively, notifications can't be posted unless native code is involved, and let's not ignore the fact that not all phones have the same perfectly smooth and seamless rendering.

I would like to have a new feature, can you implement it?

We have a roadmap for the application and many of the features suggested are planned to be implemented already. With that said we encourage you to send us e-mail with feature requests as some of them are quick enough to be implemented as part of a minor release.

Android

I no longer get addresses on my Samsung phone, can it be fixed?

We wish we could. It's a known bug in Samsung phones that have Android 4.0.4 or higher where the operating system only returns a "Service not available"-error when asked for an address for given coordinates. A way around this for many is to make sure that the phone's firmware and Google Maps is update, as well as (and this seems to be the most important) restarting the phone. Also, version 1.6.8.1 of the app is explicitly compiled against Google APIs which apperantly also helps on Samsung phones, but never until the first three steps also have been completed.

What does the "Store diagnostic data"-setting do?"

It collects up to one megabyte of diagnostic information about the application. The data will NOT be sent to us automatically and does NOT contain personally identifiable information such as coordinates. It is sent only if activated and you actively chose to send a support mail through the application. If you have a device specific problem or something that we simply haven't seen before, it helps us greatly to find and fix problems. It can be deactivated at any time at which point it will no longer collect diagnostics or send it to us when sending a support request.

The app needs a long time to find my location, can it be fixed?

Yes, it can. And the good news is: it already is. The app tries to find your location the same way Google Maps does. It will try to get it's first location fix using your telephones last known location, followed by the much faster network location, followed by the slow GPS. If, however, you have "Google's Location Services" disabled in your phone's settings, it will only use the GPS and that can take a long time depending on the manufacturer and Android version of your device. As a point of reference: On a Galaxy Nexus with both GPS and Google Location Services enabled it takes less than a second until "Start trip" can be clicked.

It's still slow, can you change the app so it doesn't disable the GPS?

It's possible but we would very likely receive complaints that the app quickly drains the battery. GPS needs a fair amount of power and if it would be running all the time it's unlikely your battery would last a whole day in your car.

Since version 1.5 the app crashes on my HTC One X, please fix it.

We're sorry to say, but the app crashes only on your HTC One X, the bug reports we have received are not reproducable on following devices: Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S2, Galaxy S3, Galaxy, Galaxy Note 10.1, Nexus S, Xperia Arc, HTC Wildfire. There is good news though, according to a user the update released by HTC in the beginning of October 2012 fixes the problem.

The app stops logging on long trips, can you fix it?

This is a behaviour that we can not reproduce. However, we got indications that this can be resolved if you remove any third party Android Task Killer application that you may have installed. In fact, no version of Android that is supported by this application requires an Android Task Killer installed to manage your device's memory, Android can do that on it's own. There are plenty of blogs about it, if you do not believe us. ;-)

Blackberry

The app needs a long time to find my location, can it be fixed?

Not right now, your phone gets it's location over GPS and that usually takes a little while. On Android we use network-based positioning, too, but this doesn't seem to be available on Blackberry's Android Runtime.

The app stops logging when I close it.

You can never leave it completely since Blackberry's Android Runtime doesn't support background running services the way Android does.

Can you make a NDK-based app?

Well, since we are looking at Ubuntu Phone which also uses QT, this may happen. Don't count on it, though.