AllTrails app vertical tracking

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timisimaginary
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Re: AllTrails app vertical tracking

Post by timisimaginary »

Dave B wrote: Thu Mar 16, 2023 9:19 am I never knew AllTrails had a user base outside of khaki-clad boomers.
people can slag off on AllTrails all they want, but it's always given me everything i need. if i was doing lots of off-trail stuff, or deep backcountry, there are better apps. but most of what i'm doing is trail running and keeping to established trails. i can make up my own maps on AllTrails and organize them easily. i tried Gaia too, and the maps on there didn't have any extra details or layers that I would need that AllTrails doesn't. but making my own maps on AllTrails was easier, and organizing them, building alternate route sections, etc was never as easy or possible in the Gaia app.
the distance and elevation tracking is accurate enough (and i rely more on my Garmin for that anyway). AllTrails has a huge user base, and that's really useful for finding reviews of certain trails, and trail conditions - the more users, the more likely a certain trail will have some recent reviews and conditions reports.
sure, some of the trails people have uploaded on the app are pretty wonky, but you can usually tell from reviews and ratings if somebody uploaded a crap route. and you can modify it to something more reasonable if you want. on the other hand, i've discovered a number of trails and locations through the app i wouldn't have found on my own otherwise.
but hey, AllTrails is popular, so it's got to be terrible, right?
"The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you're emotionally detached from it." - George Carlin
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dwoodward13
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Re: AllTrails app vertical tracking

Post by dwoodward13 »

ECF55 wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 8:13 am We also did an experiment once on a stairs section of a hike. On one flight, we took a multi-minute break on the ridge turn-around point and then compared it to the immediate (no pause) turn-around calculations. The section with the pause retained more elevation.

Gaia struggles with elevation gain calculations, but the rest of the app is gorgeous and incredibly useful.
This makes complete sense that Gaia just doesn't have a high tracking interval rate so that quick turn around test just wasn't long enough for it to record a point at the highest stair. Probably done to reduce battery usage and track log size. Seems to me more of a design choice rather than "struggling" in that its doing what is was designed to do.
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