What a browser can do
The browser's geolocation API works perfectly while the page is visible. It can give you your position, follow you to within a few metres and draw your route in real time. With the screen on and the tab open, a web app records a decent track.
The trouble starts the moment you do the obvious thing: put the phone in your pocket.
What happens when you lock the screen
Mobile operating systems treat the browser like any other application, and once it goes to the background they cut its resources aggressively to protect battery life. In practice:
- On iOS it is absolute: when you lock the screen or switch apps, Safari suspends JavaScript execution. Position tracking simply stops. There is no permission that fixes it and no trick around it: the capability does not exist for a web page.
- On Android there is a little more room, but the system throttles the update rate and eventually freezes the tab. On top of that, each manufacturer adds its own battery management, so behaviour varies from phone to phone.
The typical result is the worst possible one: a track full of holes. Three kilometres recorded, a two-kilometre straight-line jump while the phone was in your pocket, then another good section when you took it out. A falsified distance and a meaningless elevation figure.
What about an installed PWA?
It improves some things — startup, offline operation, the look of an app — but it does not change the fundamentals: it still runs on the browser engine and inherits the same background limits. Service workers do not solve this either: they are designed for short tasks, not for keeping the GPS alive for six hours.
Why a native app can
Because the operating system grants it permissions that do not exist on the web: declaring itself a background location app, keeping an activity session alive with the screen off, and continuing to receive fixes from the GPS chip even when you are in another app or the phone is in your pocket. In exchange, those permissions are requested explicitly and policed by the system.
In the meantime, plan and edit your routes in the web editor — that is what it is built for.
Open the GEPYX editorThe GEPYX app: what we are working on
This is why GEPYX is building a native application, in development right now. It is not the website in a wrapper: it is an app written from scratch for the platform, with the recording side solved the way it should be.
- Real background recording: screen off, phone away, point by point and without jumps.
- The same calculations as the web: distance, elevation and time use the same algorithms, so the numbers match between phone and editor.
- Offline maps: the place where recording matters most is exactly where there is no signal.
- Crash recovery: if the system kills the app for memory, the recording is recovered rather than lost.
- GPX both ways: the same format as always, so you can keep editing in the browser what you recorded in the mountains.
- No accounts: just like the web. Your tracks are yours and stay on your device.
In the meantime
The division of labour is fairly clear: record with the app or watch you already use, and plan and edit in GEPYX. The web editor is built for exactly what a browser does well — drawing, correcting, analysing and converting — and for that it has none of the limitations above.
If you want to start there, how to create a hiking route for free walks through the whole process. And when the app is ready, we will announce it on the site and on Instagram.