Automation
Starting, Ending, and Tidying Up Trips by Itself

Discard very short trips

When a recording ends, if it is under both limits below it is deleted rather than logged. This has always happened; until now the numbers were fixed and there was no way to see, let alone change, why a drive you took never appeared.

Both limits must be met, never one alone: a slow crawl around a car park is short in distance but not in time, and a quick blast down the road is the other way round — binning on either one would delete real drives.

Example: you leave the app armed, and the car is rolled a few metres on the drive. Auto start begins a session, you stop it twenty seconds later — 40 m and 20 s. With both limits set above those — say 30 s and 500 m, as an example — that recording is thrown away instead of appearing in your log as a “trip.”

Settings

• Shortest trip to keep — the time half of the test.
• Shortest distance to keep — the distance half.

Setting either slider to 0 means nothing is ever discarded — the same as switching the card off. Raise both if you don’t want short hops in your log at all; lower them if you do.

Notes and false positives: a genuinely short real trip — moving the car to the other side of the street, a 200 m errand — is short by both measures and will be discarded. If you need those logged, lower the limits or switch this off, and expect the occasional false start to be kept as a real trip instead.

Ignore short breaks

Keeps a drive in one piece when the app pauses it by mistake and resumes by itself soon after. If the break was shorter than the limit below, it is treated as if it had never happened: the resume carries on writing into the same leg instead of splitting your drive into two.

Only when both sides were automatic. A break you took, or one you ended by tapping resume, is always kept — however short it was. Tapping Pause for thirty seconds is a decision, and this never overrules it. Only a pause the app made and a resume the app made can collapse.

Example: driving home, you’re held at a red light right beside a petrol station the app recognises. Known places pauses the trip; forty seconds later the light changes, you drive on, and Auto resume picks up. With this card on and that gap under your Longest break to ignore, your drive home stays one continuous leg — no stub break at a petrol station you never pulled into.

Settings

• Longest break to ignore — a break shorter than this is treated as no break at all; a longer one is kept as a real break.

There is no distance setting, and there doesn’t need to be one: the vehicle is parked for the whole gap, so the distance carries no information.

Notes and false positives: raise the limit if the lights and queues where you drive routinely hold you up for longer; lower it if genuine short stops — dropping someone off, collecting a parcel — are being swallowed. A collapsed break is gone from the record: the driving either side of it becomes one leg, with no note that the app paused there. Because nothing is recorded while a trip is paused, that leg has a small gap across the break — the GPS track (and any OBD data) jumps straight from one side to the other rather than covering the time you were stopped.

Turn off standby GPS on low battery

Auto start and Auto resume keep GPS active in the background while they wait for you to drive off, and a standby can last hours with nobody looking at the screen. On a phone that’s already nearly flat, that’s the drain worth stopping first. This card can only ever save battery — it never changes a trip — which is why it ships on.

When the battery drops to the level you set and the phone is not charging, it stands Standby start, Auto start, and Auto resume down, so nothing keeps GPS running in the background.

• The change is temporary and not saved. Your switches are left exactly as they were — they simply stand down for now.
• They come back on their own the next time you start tracking, or when the app is relaunched. They are not switched back on just because you plug the phone in.
• If the phone is charging, this does nothing — the battery is on its way up, so there’s nothing to save.
• It stays dormant unless Auto start or Auto resume is on. With neither of those holding GPS there is nothing to switch off, and the card says so.

Example: you finish a drive, pause, and leave the app armed for the return leg. Hours later the battery drops to the level you set — 15%, as an example — and the standby GPS switches off before a flat battery does it for you, and simply starting tracking again re-arms everything from the settings you never lost.

Settings

• Battery level — the percentage at or below which the standby GPS is switched off. Raise it to protect the battery sooner, lower it to keep waiting for movement further down.

Notes and false positives: if it fires shortly before you actually drive off, the trip that would have started by itself won’t — start it by hand. Plugging the phone in does not bring the standby GPS back; starting tracking does.

Standby start

When enabled, tapping Start puts the app on standby instead of recording immediately. The session opens right away, but in paused mode — so you’ll see tracking begin in the paused state the moment you tap Start, with nothing yet being recorded. Actual recording only begins once you drive off, and GPS stays active in the background while it waits. You’re never locked into waiting, though — you can start recording by hand at any moment, just as you normally would.

On its own this only arms the app — it needs Auto start below to do the actual starting. Think of it as the switch that says “don’t record just yet.” Selecting Driving rather than Break when you start is the escape hatch: that records straight away.

Example: you get in the car, tap Start, then spend two minutes adjusting mirrors and setting up navigation. Nothing is recorded during that time — the trip begins the moment you pull away, so those idle minutes don’t inflate your log, and the trip’s timestamp is when you drove off rather than when you armed it.

Settings

None — the switch is the whole card. It has nothing to measure, so it never expands in Advanced mode.

Auto start

Works together with Standby start: once the app is on standby, recording begins as soon as you drive off — no need to tap Start a second time, though starting by hand still works as always and simply saves you that tap. It starts as soon as movement is confirmed, even if you were already moving when you armed it — there’s no standstill to wait for first.

With Standby start off, this card has almost nothing to react to — there is no armed session waiting — and it says so on the card.

Example: with the two sliders set to, say, 10 km/h (~6 mph) and five seconds, you arm the app in a car park and by the time you reach the exit and have held that speed for that long, recording has already begun by itself.

Settings

• Driving threshold — the speed at or above which the vehicle counts as being driven: above walking pace, but low enough to catch pulling out of a parking spot. Raise it to wait for a more definite drive; lower it to react to slower movement, at the risk of reading a slow roll across a car park as setting off.
• Movement time — how long that speed must be held before it counts as a real drive rather than GPS jitter or a brief nudge. Longer means fewer false starts but a slightly later one; shorter starts sooner and is more easily fooled by a stray reading. A single above-threshold fix never starts a session.

Notes and false positives: because this reacts to movement, it can begin a trip you didn’t mean to record — if the car is pushed or towed while armed, or if you’re a passenger with the app armed. Movement time filters out jitter but can’t tell your driving from being moved. In practice most of those recordings are tiny and Discard very short trips deletes them before they reach your log; a longer false trip has to be deleted by hand. If you don’t want a trip recorded at all, leave Standby start off.

Auto resume

Continues recording the same trip when you drive off after a break, so nothing is missed if you forget to un-pause by hand — though you can always resume, pause, or stop the trip yourself whenever you like. Unlike Auto start, a real standstill first is mandatory: the vehicle has to actually come to a halt before movement is accepted again, and there is no timeout that skips that.

Example: halfway through a drive you stop for a coffee. You tap Pause, park, and go inside — no driving is recorded while you’re paused. When you come back and drive off, the same trip continues on its own. The stop is kept as a break within that single trip, rather than splitting your drive in two or leaving a gap you forgot to close.

Another example: on a run of errands — the post office, then the supermarket, then the pharmacy — you Pause at each stop and drive on again between them. The whole outing is recorded as one trip with a break at each stop, instead of a handful of disconnected fragments you’d have to piece back together.

Settings

• Driving threshold — as on Auto start: the speed that counts as being driven. This card keeps its own value, so you can have a resume react differently from a first start.
• Standstill time — how long the vehicle must stand still before any movement is accepted as driving off again. This is the mandatory halt described above.
• Movement time — how long the driving threshold must then be held before the trip resumes.

Notes and false positives: if you tap Pause a moment too early — while the car is still rolling — this will not pick up again on its own, because the standstill never happened. That’s deliberate: not-recording is exactly what pausing asked for. Select Driving in the app to carry on immediately. In the other direction, this card is what makes a mistaken pause harmless: paired with Known places set to Pause, a trip stopped by mistake at a red light resumes by itself, and Ignore short breaks then removes the break entirely.

Known places

Ends or pauses the trip when you park somewhere the app already knows — a place you saved, or somewhere an earlier trip started, ended, or was named — even if you never added it here. It uses only local data and never looks a place up on the internet.

Because these places are known for their own reasons rather than chosen to end trips at, you decide what happens under “When you park here”:

• Auto — what the card arrives set to. Do whatever you have mostly done at this place recently, over the last handful of visits: the office is where the day’s driving ends, the supermarket is a stop on the way home, and the app already knows which is which. Until it has learned a place — and whenever it’s a tie — it simply pauses, which is the safe choice.
• Pause — always keep the trip open, so driving off resumes it (pairs with Auto resume). A pause is reversible, so a wrong guess costs nothing.
• Stop — always end the trip.

Example: with Auto selected, parking at the office (where your trips usually end) stops the trip, while parking at the supermarket (where they usually carry on) only pauses it — so driving home resumes the same trip.

Settings

• When you park here — the three-way choice above. It sits next to the switch rather than behind Advanced, because the difference between ending a trip and pausing it is what the card does, not a detail of how finely it is tuned.
• Standstill threshold — the speed below which the vehicle counts as stopped. Deliberately much lower than the driving threshold: a slow crawl into a driveway shouldn’t be mistaken for a stop, and a GPS fix taken while parked still reports a metre or two per second of noise. Raise it and the app decides you’ve stopped sooner (riskier); lower it and it demands a more complete halt.
• Standstill time — how long you must stay below that before the app accepts you’ve genuinely parked. Longer ignores a momentary halt and waits to be sure; shorter ends or pauses the trip sooner.
• Minimum trip time — how long the trip must have been running before a standstill at the place you set off from may end it. It also governs the “no second break at the place you just left” rule above.
• Minimum trip distance — the distance half of the same guard, required as well as the time. Measured along the path, so going round the block and back counts.
• Radius — how close to a known place still counts as being “here.” A parked GPS fix can sit tens of metres off, so it isn’t tiny. Too tight and a trip may not end when you park; too wide and stopping near a place the app knows can end it. A place you saved with a radius of its own is judged by that radius; this slider covers everywhere else.
• Same-place radius — how close a later stop must be to count as the same place you set off from, or last broke at, rather than a new one. Deliberately more generous than the Radius above — being at a place and it being the same place are different questions — so a car park’s spread or GPS drift still reads as one place. It’s what the minimum-trip and “no second break” guards use to decide whether you’ve returned to the same spot.

Notes and false positives: this acts on any place the app recognises — including a friend’s house you once ended a trip at — so it can pause or stop somewhere you never thought of as a destination. And a long wait at a light inside a known place looks exactly like parking there. Three things keep that harmless, and they’re worth using together:

• Leave the action on Auto or Pause, so a wrong guess is only a break and Auto resume undoes it by driving on.
• Keep Ignore short breaks on, so a short break that the app both made and undid disappears from the record entirely.
• For a specific junction that keeps catching you out, draw an exclusion circle over it in My places — nothing fires inside it, from either card.

Tightening the Radius helps with a hold-up that isn’t quite next to the place, but a stop genuinely at a known place can’t be told apart from arriving there. The three tools above are the real protection. There’s more on this in When automation acts at the wrong moment.

My places

Acts only at the places you add to this card, and each place decides for itself what parking there means. These are spots you choose deliberately, so this card takes priority over Known places wherever the two overlap.

With no places added the card does nothing, and says so. Tap + on the Places heading to add one: the editor opens a map with a find me button, a name, a radius slider, and the “When you park here” choice. Tap a row to edit that place, or the ✕ to remove it.

Each place is a circle, and each one is set to one of three things:

• Pause — break the trip here and let driving off resume it. What a new place opens on: a pause is reversible, so a place set up in a hurry can’t cost you the rest of a drive. Right for the gym, the school run, the supermarket.
• Stop — end the trip here. Right for home and the office.
• None — an exclusion: nothing happens inside this circle, from either card. This is how you switch off a spot that keeps being mistaken for a destination — a junction or a set of lights close enough to a place the app recognises that stopping there reads as arriving. An exclusion also wins over any circle it overlaps, so a small one drawn inside a bigger place carves a hole in it.

Example: you add “Home” as Stop so every commute ends by itself, “Gym” as Pause so the drive home continues the same trip, and a 40 m circle over the traffic lights just outside your street as None — so the two minutes you spend there every morning never end the trip before it has begun.

Settings

• Places — the list, always on show. Each row shows the place’s name, its coordinates, its radius, and what parking there does.
• Radius (per place, in the editor) — how big that circle is, anywhere from 10 to 500 m/yd in steps of 10 — small enough for a single gate or parking bay, large enough for a whole car park. A new place opens on a deliberately generous circle: a GPS fix taken while parked can sit tens of metres off, and too tight a radius just means the trip never ends by itself.
• When you park here (per place, in the editor) — Stop, Pause, or None, as above. Per place rather than per card, because one list holds places that mean different things.

My places has no card-level sliders: the standstill and minimum-trip guards run on the same fixed values Known places’ own sliders start from — they simply aren’t tunable here. Each place carries its own radius, so there is no card-wide one, and there is no Auto choice either: Auto answers “what has stopping here meant before?”, a fair question for a place the app recognises for unrelated reasons, but not for one you named here on purpose.

Notes and false positives:

• Radius too tight and the trip may never end by itself, because parking spots vary and GPS drifts. Too generous and a stop near — but not at — the place can end the trip early.
• A long stop at a light or in traffic inside a circle (queuing outside your office, say) can end the trip a little early. The minimum-trip rule guards the place you set off from, not stops near the end of a drive. Shrink the circle, or carve the junction out with a None circle.
• Setting a place to Pause instead of Stop is always the cheaper mistake — a pause undoes itself when you drive on.