Nothing Insightful

How to Fix Runkeeper’s Inaccurate Waypoints

You’re pretty chill. I mean, you made yourself free for all of January, and then decided to just make yourself free forever. But goddamn do your GPS waypoints just suck arse.

The above is a little snippet of tonight’s 4km run. Somehow when I say 4km run (even if I map it as a route beforehand) you just decide to go and make shit up and call it a 3.4km run. The inaccuracy of this renders the post to twitter/facebook functions useless (for me at least) because it consistently reports less distance than you actually covered. This shouldn’t really be a problem, but let’s be honest: the only reason we post a run to twitter or facebook is to be a bit of a wanker anyway.

Don’t even get me started on the UI to correct all of these waypoints. After my eight or ninth attempt in various browsers, I decided to simply create a route and enter a time (this was also frustrating as it’s pretty hard to go over the same road twice).

But the solution is really simple, for my scenario at least.

When I start an activity, I should be able to enable “snap to roads” just like I can when editing an activity after completion. The absolute worst case scenario is that the odd waypoint ends up being put somewhere between 0-30m up a side-street or past a turn. Then it becomes a matter of correcting that single point, as opposed to every single waypoint and it’s relevance to pace and elevation needing to be updated.

Yours sincerely,

Everyone in the office who has used the app.

PS. We still think you’re awesome and we’re so much fitter having known you ;)