Battery and reliable recording

An app that watches for you driving away owes you a straight answer to "is this what is eating my battery?". Milometry has a page for exactly that question. This tutorial walks through it, explains when the app actually uses power, and covers the phone settings that trade a little battery for drives that get recorded.

1. Open the Battery page

1. Open the Settings tab.
2. Under Recording a drive, tap Battery.

At the top you see your phone's charge as a percentage, with Charging or On battery underneath. It updates live while the page is open. If your phone does not report its level, it says Not available.

If Low Power Mode (iPhone) or Battery Saver (Android) is on, a LOW POWER MODE badge appears under the percentage.

2. Read "What tracking costs"

This section describes what Milometry is doing on your phone right now, based on how you have set it to record.

While a trip is recording, location runs at full accuracy. That is the expensive part, and it lasts as long as the drive does. When the drive ends, it stops.

Between trips, it depends on your Departure detection setting in Settings → Tracking:

• On Auto-record or Ask me afterwards, recording stops once you park and only a geofence stays armed: a circle around where you parked, which the phone watches and reports when you leave. The phone is already tracking where it is for its own reasons, so this costs very little.
• On Off, nothing runs between trips at all. Milometry only uses location while you have a trip recording.

In versions before 1.1.0, Ask me afterwards was called Remind me.

The last line covers Low Power Mode: recording carries on, because a drive lost to save a little charge is a bad trade.

3. On Android: the one setting that costs more on purpose

With Auto-record on, Android phones show a Never miss a drive switch under Departure detection in Settings → Tracking. It is on by default.

It watches the phone's motion sensor itself instead of waiting for Android to report a departure, and briefly checks GPS when the phone starts moving to see whether it is a car. Those checks are rationed, so carrying the phone around the house does not keep GPS running. It works with no signal, and Android is much less likely to put it to sleep.

The price is a permanent notification and, in the app's own words, a little more battery. If you turn it off, recording relies on Android waking the app, which some phones are slow or unwilling to do.

iPhone has no such switch, because iOS wakes the app for a departure on its own.

4. On Android: set battery use 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. A mileage tracker that works well is one you rarely open, which is exactly what makes Android think you do not need it.

1. On your phone, open Settings → Apps → Milometry → App battery usage.
2. Choose Unrestricted.

The wording varies slightly between makes of phone. If Milometry can see that battery optimisation is on, the Tracking screen shows a red box saying Battery optimisation is on for Milometry. Tap the box to go to the right list, find Milometry, and choose not to optimise it.

Recording a trip you start yourself is not affected by any of this.

5. On Android: phone makers' own battery savers

Some phones come with their own app killers, cleaners or "deep sleep" lists on top of Android's. They stop apps in the background, including Milometry, and the setting in Milometry still looks on. Making sure Android records your drives goes through these one at a time, with what to look for.

6. On iPhone: Low Power Mode and background settings

On iPhone, the settings that matter for reliability are about location rather than battery: location set to Always, with Precise Location on. iPhone location and background settings covers them.

If recording seems patchy while Low Power Mode is on, try a day without it and compare.

If something is not right

• Battery drain seems high. Open the Battery page and check which description you see under What tracking costs. If a trip is recording when you are not driving, open the Track tab and stop it. A trip that ran on after you parked can be trimmed afterwards.
• Drives go missing on Android. Work through steps 3 to 5, then open Milometry once. Changing phone settings does not by itself restart the watch; opening the app does.
• Drives go missing on iPhone. See iPhone location and background settings and fixing missed drives.