I have been using Dawarich for a while now and still have not figured out the best way to track my position from my Android phone.
Initially, I used OwnTracks, which produced good results by recording a point every 5 minutes; however, for some reason, it produced a single continuous track over many days.
I then heard about the updated official app and switched to that.
The problem with the official app is that it only records a point if I move more than x meters. The default value for that is 100m.
This prevents any visits from being suggested because I never record more than 1 point at a location before moving again.
The lowest value for the distance filter is 10m I think having the option to set that to 0m would solve the issue.
However, I don’t understand why there is a distance filter at all; the default option prevents visits from being suggested completely, if I understand the system correctly. And the battery consumption should not increase significantly because the location is checked, nevertheless.
Please feel free to correct me if I misunderstood the system, and the issue of no visits being suggested is a user error.
The distance filter is part of guardrails preventing Dawarich from draining your phone battery. Set it to 0m and you yourself won’t be happy with battery consumption, while 10m is a very good point for minimal precision. You can set the most precise tracking settings and measure if battery life is fine for you, and it should be already enough for Dawarich to be able to suggest visits
What is the process of recording a point? My understanding is the following:
Every “Time Filter” time or if the or if the OS notifies the app a location is receive (require the accuracy to be at least “Accuracy”).
If the time since the last recorded point is below “Time Filter”, discard.
If the moved distance is less than “Distance Filter”, discrad.
Record new point.
If this flow is correct, omitting the distance filter (set to 0m) should not drain the battery more, because the expensive GPS request happened nevertheless.
My understanding is probably wrong, but I did not find anything on how the app actually works. So please correct me!
This is a typical day where I stay in the city I live. As you can see no visits are recorded, because the App never records the same location multiple times (which is required to register a visit). Instead I get these “xh xxm untracked” sections.
