Significant locations not logged in standard mode in 1.3

[dontic]

Relates to #41

Been testing the beta app in ios 17.1.1 and the new functionalities are great.

One thing I have noticed is that I'm not getting significant locations anymore at my endpoint. While I do want to track my precise location as best as possible, it was quite useful to also get the significant locations at the same time. Thus, having a separate setting for the later was convenient.

I imagine this is because of the new settings which only let you choose one or the other but I might be wrong:

Old settings

New settings

If this is the case, would it be possible to add a "middle" option for standard+significant or both?

[aaronpk]

I thought I had read somewhere in the docs that they changed the API for this and these options are mutually exclusive now. That said, I am not finding that in the docs again, so maybe I am mis-remembering. I'll add back the "Both" option.

[dontic]

@aaronpk I've been testing this after the update. I've stopped receiving significant locations, right now I'm not sure if it's the app or if something change in ios and they've renamed "arrival_date" to a different string so my backend is not processing it correctly anymore

I'll investigate this further when I have a bit more time

[aaronpk]

Significant locations don't look much different from regular updates, they get delivered to the app the same way. They will likely have a much worse accuracy though.

arrival_date is from the Visit tracking feature. Overland sets the arrival_date on a location update when it logs a "visit" event, the property from iOS is arrivalDate on the CLVisit object. You will also see action: visit on the property. This is only included when the "Include Tracking Stats" setting is enabled, which has moved to the system settings screen outside of the app.

I am not sure why I tied the Visit logging to the "Tracking Stats" checkbox. I suspect it's because I wasn't thinking of Visits as something that would normally want to be logged. The Visit event also triggers prompting to end an in-progress trip. So I suppose a different option here is to add new toggle switch to enable Visit tracking in the app.

[dontic]

I got super confused there. Thought significant locations = visits. It's well documented in the readme 🤦🏻‍♂️

As for including the setting in the app, I personally leave it always on. I have a different table on my database for visits, which I then visualize on a different map plot (this has proven often even more useful for me than the trips):

It can be useful to give the option of track visits and metadata separately though, if that's even possible. There might be people that might want to get metadata without visits or viceversa, but not really sure how many are there to make it worth it.

Thanks for the nice insights!

[aaronpk]

Ok cool well I'm convinced that visit-only tracking is something people might want, so I'll work on that.

It's well documented in the readme

Where are you seeing that?

[aaronpk]

Turns out there has been an open issue for visit-only tracking from years ago, so we'll continue the visit-only feature discussion there: #31

[dontic]

Where are you seeing that?

The system settings part of readme clearly states:

• Include tracking stats - Toggle whether to include visit and app metadata in the log as well. This is useful when trying to understand the app lifecycle and how the various tracking settings affect the app's behavior, but you probably don't want it enabled for production passive tracking usage.

So yeah, really well documented there but somehow flew over my head.

Thanks again for the clarification, will keep testing 👍

[aaronpk]

Oh sorry I misunderstood, I thought you were saying that "significant location = visits" was documented in the README and I was looking for where to fix it!

I'm excited that you have had good luck with the Visits feature, and that's a great map! All the more motivation for me to polish that off a bit.

[lostfocus]

And thanks for the inspiration - I don't do anything with my visits data, yet but that map is a cool idea!