Tips for Using Scoria

Sep 3, 2024

Ensuring Continuous Logging

This section applies mainly to iOS, which is more strict about delivering location updates to background apps.

You may have noticed times when Scoria stopped logging your movement without you changing anything. Opening the app expecting to have hours or days of new activity to analyze, only to find your movement wasn't logged, can be frustrating.

Scoria gets location updates from your device's OS, and it must be running in the background to receive locations. There are a couple reasons why Scoria might stop running.

• Scoria hasn't been opened in the past day. Location services take power to run, and the OS assumes that you don't want to be losing battery life to apps that you're not actively using. The same can be said for privacy loss, since most apps are not as privacy-forward as Scoria, and this behavior helps protect your privacy in the average case. On iOS, Scoria may be shut down in as little as 24 hours since it was last opened.
• Your device's battery level is low, or it's in low-power mode. The OS may shut down Scoria to save battery life.
• Scoria was updated. After an update, Scoria might not start running again until you reopen it.
• Scoria was shut down in the app switcher.

In all of these cases, it's necessary to reopen Scoria for it to start logging locations again.

Factors of Power Use

Sometimes you may find that Scoria drains your battery more than expected.

When using Automatic Mode, Scoria's power consumption depends on how much you move around. Whenever you're stationary, Scoria saves power by switching to a lower-accuracy location mode behind the scenes. When it detects that you're moving, it changes to a higher-accuracy mode, better capturing the details of your movement. If you don't usually spend most of the day in motion, a full day of movement can consume more battery than you might expect. When traveling a lot, we recommend using an external battery to ensure your device stays charged while still logging accurate location data.

Alternatively, you can switch to Reduced Mode if you don't mind a decrease in data accuracy. In Reduced Mode, power consumption doesn't change according to your movement as much.

Conditions that reduce data accuracy, as discussed in the next section, can also increase power use, as your device has to work harder to produce data with the same accuracy.

Factors of Data Accuracy

The data Scoria collects can often be inaccurate, and there's many reasons why your device can produce low-accuracy location data. For example:

• There might be obstructions that block or reflect signals from GPS/GNSS satellites, like tall buildings in urban areas, or if you're indoors.
• You might lack an internet connection. Your device may use information about GPS/GNSS satellites from the internet to more quickly solve for your location.
• You might be out of range of WiFi access points or cell towers. Your device may use the presence of these signals, even if you're not connected to them, to determine your location with less accuracy than GPS/GNSS, but with better power efficiency.

Use Filters to Clean Up Data

Your device's OS estimates of the accuracy of your location data, and this estimate is stored along with each data point in your database. You can filter locations based on this accuracy to hide inaccurate data from the map and the timeline. Filters are accessed on the map tab, under the filter icon. 100 meters (330 feet) is the default accuracy filter, but we've found 20 meters (55 feet) to be another good balance between hiding inaccuracies, and not hiding too much.

Scoria Versioning

Scoria versions describe compatibility with other versions of Scoria. Versions are broken down into three components: the major, minor, and patch version numbers. At the time of this writing, the current version of Scoria is 1.4.2. The major version number is 1, minor is 4, and patch is 2.

The meaning of the version numbers follows Semantic Versioning. The patch version number is incremented for releases which do not affect compatibility. The minor version number is incremented for releases that break compatibility with older versions of Scoria. The major version number is incremented for releases that break forwards compatibility, which should happen very rarely, if ever.

Currently, compatibility is defined by whether a Scoria database can be imported into a different version of Scoria. Occasionally, new releases of Scoria introduce changes to the way data is stored in your database. After one of these updates, your database is migrated to the new format, and becomes incompatible with an older version of the app. These database changes are indicated by an increase in the app's minor version number, since they are incompatible with older versions of the app.

Older databases can still be imported into a newer version of Scoria, since the app knows how to update an old database. But an old app won't know how to deal with a newer database format, since it doesn't know how the database changes in the future.

For example, a database exported from Scoria 1.4.2 is compatible with versions of Scoria that share the same minor number, such as 1.4.0, 1.4.1, and 1.4.3, as well as versions that have a higher minor number, such as 1.5.0, and 1.6.0. But the database is not compatible with app versions that have a smaller minor number, like 1.2.0 or 1.3.0.