I’ve been on strava for about a year, the first 11 months of which have been through my iPhone without a single problem. I switched to an android phone last month and have had some wildly varying results. On Monday my usual 6 mile run was calculated at 22 miles ( which did wonders for my segment times as it said I was running 2 minute miles) and then the last two days the same run has been calculated at 4.5 miles and 2.2 miles – even though the GPS mapping shows the complete route?

So. Is it just a bit rubbish?

Sounds like it.

more likely to be the specific phone than the app, was very consistent on my daily commute on my cheapo htc

Or its your phone’s GPS, not the app.
I’ve used Strava for nearly 2 years on a couple of Android phones, seems fairly consistent to me.

Bit random with what it chooses not to record and upload ime. (Does the weather make a difference to gps signal btw?)

jam bo, Carl Phillips had the (android) strava record on Egypt, about a minute faster than anyone else. He was riding Proper job at the time. 😆 (for anyone else, these are two downhill trails at gawton which start in the same place but are otherwise about 100m apart the rest of the way down…)

Hmm…

*toddles off to read up on gps issues on Galaxy S3

Strava segments at gawton are a mess. Steep sided, heavily wooded valley is always going to be a tough one for any GPS.

There’s a random factor for me but it’s never huge (I did some short road laps a while back and looking at the GPS trace, the points were all over the place, but it more or less averaged out)

It does occasionally pick up plain wrong stuff- like, it simultanously logs times down parallel trails, etc. Seems to go entirely off start and finish points?

It’s down to the GPS rather than the app.
I used the Android app for months before switching to a Garmin and never had any problems with it (HTC Desire S).

The phone tends to record its position about once every 4 seconds whereas a GPS computer like a Garmin records every second. What it means is that the phone can sometimes miss segment start/finish points or it’ll shortcut corners on fast descents just because the GPS can’t keep up. To be fair, phone GPS isn’t really designed for that, it’s designed for mapping apps at walking pace.

the GPS can’t keep up. To be fair, phone GPS isn’t really designed for that, it’s designed for mapping apps at walking pace.

My running is at walking pace 🙂

I had a HTC wildfire that would erratically have me cycling across the english channel and back from a start In East Lothian. Thats the reason I bought a cheap Garmin.

It can be pretty phone dependent. I’ve got an HTC One X+ and it works fine, a guy at work has an S3 mini and he can’t get it to work at all.