Make sure Android records your drives

If Milometry is not starting your drives by itself on Android, it is almost never the app deciding not to. It is Android deciding the app should be asleep, and doing it without telling either of you. The setting still reads as on, the permission still looks granted, and nothing happens.

This page is the list of things to check, in the order most likely to be the problem. It takes about five minutes once.

iPhone users do not need any of this. Apple's system wakes an app for this on its own account, so the equivalent page would be blank.

Why Android is different

Milometry watches a small circle around wherever you parked, and starts recording when you leave it. It also watches for the phone deciding it is in a moving vehicle. Both of those are handled by the phone rather than by the app, because the app is not running while your car is on the drive. That is the point: an app that ran all day to watch for a drive would eat your battery.

The cost of that bargain is that every battery-saving feature Android ships is, from a certain angle, designed to stop exactly this working.

1. Wi-Fi, even if you never connect to it

This is the one nobody guesses, and it may be the most common.

Android works out where your phone is partly from the Wi-Fi networks it can see, whether or not it joins any of them. It is faster and cheaper than GPS, so the system leans on it. Turn Wi-Fi off completely and your phone falls back to mobile masts, which place you within a few hundred metres at best.

The circle Milometry watches around your parking space is 120 metres across. If your phone only knows where you are to within 300 metres, it cannot tell when you have left a 120 metre circle. So nothing fires, and nothing looks wrong.

What to do: leave Wi-Fi switched on, even when you are out. If you would rather not, open Settings → Location → Location services → Wi-Fi scanning and leave that on instead. Scanning alone is enough, and it does not connect you to anything.

2. Battery: set Milometry to Unrestricted

Android puts apps to sleep when it decides they are not being used, and a sleeping app misses the moment you drive away.

There is a trap in this that is particular to a mileage tracker. The better automatic recording works, the less reason you ever have to open the app. An app you never open looks, to Android's battery manager, exactly like an app you do not want.

What to do: Settings → Apps → Milometry → App battery usage → Unrestricted.

The default is "Optimised", and it is not enough. "Restricted" is worse and will stop background recording outright. Milometry warns you about this on the Tracking screen if it can see the setting is wrong.

3. Location: Allow all the time, and Precise

Two separate controls, and both are needed. They are easy to get half right.

Allow all the time is not the same as "While using the app". Milometry has to be able to notice a departure while you are not looking at your phone, which is the entire feature.

Precise is a separate switch beside it. Approximate location rounds your position to something like a neighbourhood, which is far larger than the circle being watched. With it off, the result is the same as having Wi-Fi off: nothing ever fires.

What to do: Settings → Apps → Milometry → Permissions → Location, then choose Allow all the time and turn Use precise location on.

4. Do not swipe the app away

Swiping Milometry out of your recent apps is not the same as closing a window. On many phones it tells Android you want the app stopped, and a stopped app receives nothing at all until you open it again by hand. Not the departure, not a reminder, nothing.

You do not need to close it. It is not running while you are parked; that is why it does not cost you battery.

What to do: leave it in the recents list. If you have already swiped it away, just open it once and everything comes back.

5. Task killers, cleaners and battery savers

Anything that advertises itself as freeing up memory, boosting battery or cleaning your phone works by stopping other apps. Some phone manufacturers build one in.

What to do: if you have one, add Milometry to its whitelist, ignore list or protected apps list. If drives start being recorded once you do, that was the cause.

After you have changed anything

Open Milometry once. Changing these settings does not, by itself, put the watch back; opening the app does.

Then drive. The first journey after a change is the test.

If it is still not working

Milometry keeps a record of what it tried and what stopped it. It is deliberately out of the way, because almost nobody needs it.

Open Settings → About, then tap the Milometry icon at the top ten times. A diagnostics screen opens showing every step, newest first. Tap Copy all and send it to us at milometry.com/contact.

It tells us in one glance whether your phone reported the departure and the app ignored it, or whether the phone never reported it at all. Those are different faults with different fixes, and without that list we are guessing.

Sources

• App standby buckets, Android Developers
• App hibernation and permission auto-reset, Android Developers
• Optimise Doze and App Standby, Android Developers
• Detect when users start or end an activity, Android Developers