Fairphone 4 Phonetrack GPS glitches: outlier points recorded far away

[meonkeys]

I’ve got a Fairphone 4 running /e/ OS v1.15. My carrier is T-Mobile USA.

I’m using the Phonetrack mobile app (v0.1.0) and Nextcloud app (v0.7.6) to track and view my device’s location. It mostly works exactly as I’d expect. That is, quite well!

Every now and then (once or twice every 24 hours) there’s an errant location logged hundreds of miles away. Looks like usually just one outlier (but I haven’t looked at the Phonetrack data closely to see if it is one or many points). The Phonetrack mobile app is configured to use network and GPS as location providers.

I don’t see any issues like this when I use, for example, OpenTracks to record a hike or something, so I suppose the issue could be related to Phonetrack. I’m not sure what kind of logic (if any) it has to deal with outliers.

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[smu44]

Did you try to set it to GPS only?
Looks to me that sometimes app can’t get GPS accurate position, then fallback to inaccurate network location.

[meonkeys]

Good idea. Done. Seems to be working better so far. I’ll keep an eye on for the next week or so.

Any idea if either setting might use more battery? Or perhaps it just pulls lat/long points from microG?

[smu44]

I think it will get real GPS location, every time.

And this may come with a small battery cost, depending on your GPS hardware & performance, as well as some system settings.
You can find a “Battery saving” preconfigured profile in 3-dot menu when editing your session, it may worth a try! Also some other parameters may be tuned, depending on your activity and your needs.

I did not dig deeply into battery stats on my devices, but as far as I can see PhoneTrack app is not a battery-eager.
Some interesting, although quite old, reading: https://gitlab.com/eneiluj/phonetrack-oc/-/issues/175#note_130338568 (link to another interesting thread at the end).