Guide
How to record a GPS trip on Android without losing it
Short answer
A half-recorded drive is almost never the app failing to save. It is Android, or your phone manufacturer, deciding that a background app was expendable and stopping it mid-journey.
Four things prevent it, in order of how much difference they make: grant precise location rather than approximate; set the app to Unrestricted in Android's battery settings; allow it in your manufacturer's own auto-start or protected-apps list, which is separate and stricter; and leave the recording notification alone, because dismissing it reads as a signal that the service is unwanted. After that, mount the phone where it can see the sky and wait for a solid fix before you start.
Why this is a problem at all
Recording a trip is one of the few things a phone does that genuinely needs to keep running while you are not looking at it. Everything about modern Android is designed to prevent exactly that.
Android's own answer is the foreground service: a background task that declares itself, shows a permanent notification, and in exchange gets protection from the usual culling. Any trip recorder worth using runs as one — that notification you see while recording is not clutter, it is the thing keeping the recording alive.
The complication is that most manufacturers ship a second battery-saving layer on top of Android's, tuned more aggressively, and that layer does not always respect the foreground service contract. It is why the same app records perfectly on one brand and loses half the drive on another.
Step 1 — Precise location, not approximate
Since Android 12 the permission dialog offers a choice between precise and approximate location. Approximate is intentionally coarse — accurate to something like a neighbourhood — which is a sensible default for an app that only needs to know your city.
For a trip log it is useless. There is no speed to derive, no route to draw and no distance worth adding up. If you granted approximate by accident, fix it in Settings → Apps → the app → Permissions → Location → Precise.
Step 2 — Stop the system from killing it
This is the step that actually matters, and it is two settings, not one.
Android's own: Settings → Apps → your recording app → Battery → Unrestricted. The wording varies a little by version, but the option you want is the least restrictive one available.
Your manufacturer's: a separate list, under a different name, usually buried. These are the common ones:
| Brand | Roughly where to look |
|---|---|
| Samsung | Battery and device care → Battery → Background usage limits. Make sure the app is not in "Sleeping apps" or "Deep sleeping apps". |
| Xiaomi, Redmi, POCO | App info → Battery saver → No restrictions, and enable Autostart for the app. |
| Huawei, Honor | Battery → App launch → switch the app to Manage manually and enable all three toggles. |
| OPPO, realme, OnePlus | Battery → App battery management, or Advanced settings; allow background running and disable Sleep standby optimisation. |
| vivo, iQOO | Battery → High background power consumption, and allow the app to run in the background. |
Menu names move between versions, so treat these as a direction rather than a map. The thing you are looking for always sounds like permission to keep running, and it is always separate from Android's own battery screen.
One more, easy to miss: do not dismiss or block the recording notification. On Android, turning off an app's notifications can take the foreground service's protection with it.
Step 3 — Give the receiver a chance
Where the phone sits changes the quality of everything that gets recorded.
- Near the windscreen, in a mount. A door pocket or a centre-console bin puts the car's own metal between the receiver and the sky, and a phone sliding around adds motion that was never the car's.
- Watch out for heated windscreens. The metallised layer used for heating and for infrared reflection, common on European cars, attenuates satellite signals measurably. Many such cars have a small unmetallised patch behind the mirror for exactly this reason.
- Wait before you start. Thirty to sixty seconds outdoors, until the app stops warning you about signal quality. A well-behaved recorder discards positions with poor accuracy rather than counting them, so starting early usually means the first stretch of the drive is simply missing.
Step 4 — Pause, don't stop
For anything longer than a moment — fuel, lunch, a hotel — pause the recording rather than finishing it and starting a new one.
Pausing does two useful things. The route, speed curve and altitude profile are drawn as separate segments across the gap instead of being joined by a straight line through the countryside. And the stop is counted as stopped time, kept out of your moving average, so a forty-minute lunch does not halve the average speed of the day's drive.
Step 5 — Export what you would hate to lose
Most trip recorders, this one included, store everything locally and sync nothing. That is a deliberate privacy decision — a log of everywhere you drive is not something to keep on someone else's server — and it has an obvious consequence: uninstall the app, or change phone, and the history is gone.
GPX is the way out. It is a plain, open format holding every recorded point with its time and altitude, and hiking, cycling and mapping software reads it. If a trip mattered, export it the same day.
Reading the failures
When something does go wrong, the shape of the damage tells you what happened.
| What you see | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| A straight line across the map | Nothing was recorded between those two points. Normal through a tunnel or an underground car park; on an ordinary road it means the recording was killed and later resumed. |
| The trip ends before you did | The service was stopped and never came back. Battery optimisation, almost always. |
| Distance stops climbing while you drive | Accuracy has dropped below the app's threshold and it is refusing to add uncertain metres. Tree cover, dense city, or the phone somewhere with no sky. |
| A spike to an impossible speed | A reflected signal, or a jump on regaining a fix. Good recorders reject implausible movement; this one rejects any jump beyond what 100 m/s over the elapsed time could explain. |
| Nothing saved at all | The trip was below the minimum worth keeping. In Speedometer One that is 20 metres or 10 seconds — enough to discard an accidental tap, not a real drive. |
Common questions
Why does my GPS recording stop when the screen goes off?
Battery optimisation, in nearly every case. Set the app to Unrestricted in Android's battery settings and allow it in your manufacturer's separate auto-start or protected-apps list.
Does recording a GPS trip drain the battery?
More than an idle phone, comparable to running navigation for the same time. Turning the screen off saves more than anything else, since the display usually costs more than the receiver.
Should I use precise or approximate location?
Precise. Approximate is deliberately coarse and cannot produce a usable speed, distance or route.
Where should I put the phone while recording?
In a mount near the windscreen, where it can see the sky and cannot slide around. Door pockets and console bins are the two worst common choices.
Why is there a straight line across my route where I stopped?
Because nothing was recorded in that gap and the app joined the two points it had. Expected underground; a warning sign anywhere else.
Record the whole drive
Speedometer One records in the background with a foreground service, pauses and resumes cleanly, and exports to GPX. Free on Android.
Disclosure: I am the developer of Speedometer One, the Android app this site is about. The manufacturer settings above are described generically because the menus move between versions and regions; where a specific number is quoted for Speedometer One, it comes from the app's own source.