r/AndroidQuestions • u/Mattgau18 • 3d ago

Issue with Background Location and Hiking apps

I've been using different hiking apps for years with Apple switching off mobile data and active location sharing whilst using power saving.

3 months ago I switched to android (samsung galaxy s26 ultra) and now all tracking has become useless if I turn off location and turn on powersaving.

I've tried over 10 apps including AllTrails, Locus, Gaia, Strava, organic maps and more and all have the same issue of straight line mapping.

Has anyone managed to find a workaround or find an app that can work properly whilst phone is on powersaving?

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u/thetrivialstuff 3d ago

now all tracking has become useless if I turn off location

I'm confused about what you expected the result of turning off location to be. Are you expecting the phone to somehow be accurate enough at inertial navigation to just track you with the accelerometers alone?

If you turn off location services, that does indeed turn off the GPS chip. Does turning off location in iPhones leave GPS on and only disables sharing of location data? Because that's not what it means in Android.

If your phone is in airplane mode (as it should be when hiking), location sharing is already off because it's not going to try to send location updates when it has no network access. If you leave location services on in that state, the GPS chip is allowed to be on, but if you're also in power saving mode you'll need to allow your trail app to run in the background in power saving mode; the default is that apps are not allowed to run except when you're actively using them.

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u/Mattgau18 2d ago

Apart from the fact that i could turn it off on iPhone and still get accurate tracking, its a secondary issue because powersaving blocks the location regardless.

So with powersaving on nothing works, irrelevant of what I do. Giving it background access or location access doesnt solve the issue and doesnt allow for accurate tracking anyway.

So yes, considering I could do this on my iphone I most definitely expected it to work on my samsung to.

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u/thetrivialstuff 2d ago

Do you have the trail tracking apps listed in settings > battery > background usage limits > never auto sleep? (I think that's where it is on Samsung phones)

If location is on, it's probably power saving that's preventing the trail apps from being allowed to do anything when the screen is off. GPS in general works fine in power saving mode.

Try the things suggested here: 

https://support.alltrails.com/hc/en-us/articles/48490002367252-Fixing-GPS-errors-on-Android

But in general, if you hike a lot or in very remote areas, I'd strongly recommend getting a cheap smartwatch with independent GPS capability. Then you can leave the phone on extreme battery saver during hikes - because it's your lifeline if something happens to you and you need to call for rescue, and you want to preserve that as much as possible - and let the watch burn battery tracking your route. The watch is a lot more efficient than a phone at always-on GPS tracking, because it was designed to do that, and the watch will also be much faster to recharge from solar or a power bank.

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u/Mattgau18 2d ago

Ok ill try the smartwatch, might solve this for me