How to record a motorcycle ride with GPS (without gaps)

A recorded ride sounds like the easy part — press start, ride, press stop. In practice, phones are actively hostile to background GPS logging, and riders end up with a trace full of holes and a distance that is 15 kilometres short.

Here is how to get a clean recording, and what an app should be doing on your behalf.

Why gaps happen

The operating system suspends your app. This is the big one. Both iOS and Android aggressively suspend background apps to save battery. Lock the screen, put the phone in a tank bag, and within roughly half a minute on iOS — a bit longer on Android — your recording can be paused without warning. You find out at home.

Coverage vanishes. A tunnel is obvious. Less obvious is a deep valley with steep sides, a dense stand of trees, or a cutting, all of which degrade the position fix badly rather than losing it cleanly.

The battery dies. Predictable, preventable, still the most common cause of a half-recorded ride.

The app is killed. Memory pressure, a crash, a rider accidentally swiping it away.

What to do about each

Keep the screen awake

The single most effective fix. An app that requests a wake lock while recording stops the screen locking, which stops the suspension.

The natural version of this is running turn-by-turn navigation. A navigating app is foregrounded and awake by definition, which is why riders who navigate rarely have gaps and riders who “just record” often do. If you are going anywhere unfamiliar, navigate — you get a cleaner log for free.

On Android, also disable battery optimisation for the app. It is buried in the app’s battery settings, and it is the difference between a clean trace and a broken one on aggressive manufacturer skins.

Ride with power

Screen-on navigation with continuous GPS is the heaviest sustained load you can put on a phone. Many phones will lose charge even while plugged into a weak USB port.

Get this right once and never think about it again: a hardwired outlet, a cable that will not vibrate loose, and a mount that does not lever the plug sideways. The mount and power guide has the specifics, including the vibration damage issue that quietly kills phone cameras.

Expect the app to buffer locally

This is on the app rather than you, but it is worth knowing what good behaviour looks like. Points should be written to local storage as they arrive, not held in memory. Then if the app is killed, the points already recorded survive and sync later. An app that keeps a ride only in memory loses the whole thing when the operating system decides it needs the RAM.

The honest handling of gaps

When a gap happens anyway, there are two things an app can do, and the difference matters more than it sounds.

For the picture: draw the missing section in from your planned route so the trip line looks continuous. Reasonable — a line with a hole in it looks broken.

For the record: treat that filled section as a guess, because it is one. It may be exactly where you went. It may not be.

Our rule is absolute: a filled section is flagged as assumed, is never fed into map-matching, and never marks a road as ridden. Only real GPS does that. It means your ridden-roads map occasionally lags reality — and it means that when a road is orange, you were definitely there. A map that is 95% true is worth nothing, because you cannot tell which 5% is fiction.

The same goes for manually adding “I rode this”. Stored separately, does not colour the map, unless a real GPS pass later confirms it.

Practical settings for a clean trace

• Start the recording before you pull out, with the bike stationary and a good sky view, so the first fix is solid.
• Give it a moment to lock on. Starting mid-roll with a poor fix puts a wild first point in your trace.
• Navigate if you can. Cleanest logs, fewest gaps.
• Do not swipe the app away at a fuel stop. Leave it running.
• End the ride deliberately when you get home. An abandoned recording keeps burning battery and adds a cloud of stationary jitter to your driveway.

What happens to the trace afterwards

A raw recording is a fuzzy caterpillar of points, not a line. Turning it into something meaningful takes two steps:

Cleaning. Stationary jitter — the cloud of drifting points a phone produces during an hour at a café — is filtered out so it does not inflate your distance or smear across nearby roads. Wild outliers from bounced signals are dropped.

Map-matching. The cleaned trace is matched to the actual road network, producing a list of the specific roads you rode rather than a floating line. That is what fills in your map and what makes avoid-visited routing possible.

A quick test before a big ride

Do this once, on a short local loop, before you rely on recording for a trip that matters:

1. Start a recording and ride 20 minutes with the screen locked in a pocket or tank bag.
2. Stop, and look at the trace.
3. If it is complete, your setup survives suspension. If it has holes, enable the wake lock, turn off battery optimisation, and try again.
4. Check the distance against your odometer. They should be within a couple of percent.

Ten minutes now saves a ruined log of the ride you actually cared about.