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What a field test actually costs

· 3 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

You can test an app for weeks at a desk and learn less than you learn in one afternoon with it mounted on a handlebar. This week was the bill for a real ride.

Things that only break outdoors​

  • "Add stop" silently dropped the waypoint. You tap it, nothing happens, you assume you mis-tapped and tap again. Fixed — and stops are now reorderable, because the second thing you want after adding one is to move it.
  • The "My rides" toggle was missing in portrait. Present in landscape, invisible in portrait: the orientation nobody develops in and everybody rides in.
  • Navigation failures were silent. If a ride would not start, the app said nothing whatsoever — no error, no spinner, no clue. Both the phone and CarPlay now surface why, which turned a category of unreproducible field reports into a screenshot.
  • CarPlay joypad zoom moved the vehicle. Zooming with the car's controls drifted the bike icon off its actual geographic position, so the map was right and the bike on it was lying.

Rerouting on a trail, again​

Come off a TET trail and the old behaviour rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. Now the reroute trims the original trail — instantly, with turn-by-turn preserved, no round trip to a server you may not be able to reach.

You rejoin where you left. Being handed a brand-new plan for a ride you are already halfway through is technically a reroute and practically a betrayal.

Offline routing, redesigned​

Per-region tile_dir installs replaced the previous scheme, which had a habit of working perfectly right up until it didn't — and failing in a way that was hard to diagnose from a layby. Each region now installs into its own directory, so a corrupt or half-downloaded pack takes out one country rather than your whole offline setup.

Field fixes went in alongside it, plus some navigation and voice work recovered from a branch that had quietly drifted out of sight.

A Bluetooth helmet, and every ride at once​

Two smaller ones with outsized effect. The app now takes microphone input from a Bluetooth helmet, which is the difference between voice notes being a feature and being something you actually use at 90 km/h.

And the map can overlay all your rides at once. Watching a season accumulate as one tangle of lines across a country is unreasonably satisfying, and it also shows you — instantly, without any analysis — the parts of your own region you have somehow never ridden.

And a services page on the car screen​

Fuel and campgrounds ahead along your route — not "near you", which is useless at 90 km/h — with one tap to add as a stop.

The lesson we keep relearning​

Every one of these was invisible until someone rode with it. So we will keep riding with it.

Dig deeper: the rider app guide.