Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Open Letter to the Makers of AllSportGPS
I bought your iPhone application about a year ago, and was very happy with it for three quarters of a year. Then something happened and the program stopped working correctly. It tells me that I was resting when I was running. It takes forever to lock onto the GPS. All in all, it no longer does anything that I want it to do, so i'm removing it from my phone in favor of a better exercise tracking application. Next time, try paying some attention to the performance of your application.
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3 comments:
Todd: This is Kris from AllSport GPS. Sorry that you're experiencing problems. Let's try to resolve them. I have a few questions:
When did your errors start occurring? Is it most recently with the launch of iOS 4 launch. Like other app makers, we noticed that some things are not backwards compatible with the new iPhone software. As of last Friday, we submitted a new release of AllSport to Apple for certification. It should be released any day now.
Can you share a few of the runs that had you resting when you were running? What are the website urls? We'll take a look. Resting can be a hard metric to measure (and is dependent on how good the GPS reception).
GPS lock issues? We noticed a few GPS lock problems earlier this year, mainly with users who were moving in and out of the cell network. We fixed those in March. Can you tell me how long it takes to acquire a lock and in what type of terrain?
Thanks. Kris
Kris: First of all, thanks for responding! It’s easy to forget sometimes that I’m not just writing for the small group of friends that read my blog.
The problems for me started a few months ago (five?), well before OS4 was released. I started noticing that it sometimes took 5 minutes or more to get a GPS lock on the same routes where I would normally get a lock in 30 seconds or so. The terrain is typical middle Mass (I live in Ashland, MA) with lots of rolling hills and trees. When I first started using the app, I quickly learned to avoid certain densely wooded areas until I received a lock, and expected a long lock time when it was cloudy. However, I walk and run in the same areas over and over, and where i used to get quick locks, recently i've had problems, but as far as I can tell there isn't any pattern to the problems.
I ran a road race last month where the app appeared to pause itself multiple times during the race (I could feel the phone vibrate multiple times as I was running). The link to it is here: http://www.trimbleoutdoors.com/ViewTrip/770625 and you can see the red line where the app missed all of my running through the side streets. Also note that the app registered 4 miles, when the race was an accredited 5K.
Another run with a lot of “resting” is this one: http://www.trimbleoutdoors.com/ViewTrip/765536, even though I was continually running for the entire time.
Having said all of that, I ran AllSportGPS on my run this morning and it performed perfectly. But that just emphasizes the bigger problem, that the application just hasn’t been reliable for me recently.
I look forward to your response, and am hoping that your release will solve some of the issues I’ve been having!
Todd: How's it running now. We, like many developers, saw some hiccups appear out of nowhere with some new Apple software upgrades. We've done a lot of new releases in the past month. Let me know. -kris
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