Support — WhereIWas: Location Timeline

Getting started

Set it up once, then leave it alone.

Three permissions and one switch, and there is nothing left to remember before you set off: the switch survives relaunches, reboots and terminations until you turn it off yourself.

Allow location, then choose Always. iOS asks for While-Using first and offers Always a little later — accept it when it appears, or set it in Settings. Background recording is impossible without it.
Keep Precise Location on. With it off, iOS gives the app positions accurate to a kilometre or so. The app still records and flags it on the status screen, but the track is no longer useful.
Allow Motion & Fitness. This is what saves the battery: it is how the app knows you are moving without asking the GPS.
Turn tracking on. It stays on across relaunches, reboots and terminations until you turn it off.

While the receiver is running you will see the blue indicator in the status bar. That is deliberate — an app recording your position in the background should say so.

You will see it while the app is idle too, and there is no setting to hide it. What holds it up is the background session the app keeps for as long as tracking is on, and that session is what lets the next trip — which starts with the app in the background — be recorded at all. Releasing it between trips is a documented way of having iOS suspend the app instead.

Troubleshooting

There is a gap in my track

Turn on the audit trail in Settings and repeat the conditions. Every gap has an entry explaining it: a fix rejected with the check that failed and the value that failed it, a decision to stop the receiver, or a permission change. If the gap starts with a reboot or with the app being swiped away, see the limits on the overview — those are iOS behaviours no app can avoid.

Nothing was recorded after I restarted my iPhone

Expected until you unlock the device once. iOS keeps app data encrypted until first unlock, so nothing can run before then. Recording resumes on your first movement afterwards.

The battery drain is higher than I expected

Check Motion & Fitness permission first — without it the app has to use GPS to detect movement, which is the expensive way to do it. Then look at Watch after a stop in Settings: five minutes by default, and it is what stops a set of traffic lights costing you the rest of the trip. It runs on a wide filter and costs little, but on a day of many short stops it adds up — lower it, or set it to zero to switch the receiver off the moment you do. The receiver itself is what costs, so a day of driving costs far more than a day at a desk; the status screen shows which receiver profile is in force at any moment.

Tracking stopped and did not come back

If the app was force-quit from the app switcher, iOS stops sending it background events entirely. Open the app once and recording resumes on its own.

My exported file will not open

GPX exports are plain GPX 1.1 with extra data in an extension namespace; tools that do not understand the extensions ignore them and read the track normally. An audit-trail export arrives compressed — .json.gz or .txt.gz, since a week of trail is tens of megabytes of text — which Files, Finder and any gzip reader open; the export sheet has a switch to turn that off. If a file fails to open anywhere, send it with a bug report.

Contact

Reporting something.

For a bug, include what you expected, what happened, your iOS version and iPhone model. If it concerns a gap or a wrong position, an audit-trail export covering the period is worth more than any description.

Issue tracker: github.com/glandais/WhereIWas/issues
Email: gabriel.landais@gmail.com
Source code: github.com/glandais/WhereIWas
Tip jar: ko-fi.com/gabylandais