Accidentally killed your tour? It's still there

The problem nobody needs

Recording a tour is a bit like writing a long document without saving along the way: as long as nothing happens, you don't even notice how much is at stake. And then something happens after all. The phone buckles because five other apps are still running in the background. The battery gives up. Or - my personal favourite - you tidy up the app switcher and swipe away exactly the recording that has just collected two hours of route.

In the old days that meant: tough luck. The route, the elevation, the steps, all of it was in the app's working memory - and that's gone the moment the app is gone. An hour of cycling that never happened. According to the stats, at least.

What the crash safeguard now does differently

The app no longer trusts itself - and that's a good thing. While a tour is running, it continuously writes the progress to secure storage on the device, not just to volatile working memory. If the app crashes or is closed, the last saved state is already on disk.

• Every few seconds the current state is saved automatically in the background - without you doing a thing.
• At every pause and every change of status it is saved immediately, not just at the next interval.
• When the app goes into the background - the most common moment for a phone to clear the app away - it is likewise saved at once.
• What gets saved is what counts: the route, the duration, the elevation and the sensor state - so it picks up seamlessly right where you left off.

And if something does go wrong?

Then you simply restart the app. On launch it notices that there's still an interrupted recording lying around and offers to continue it. One tap on Resume - and you carry on recording as if nothing had happened. The route so far is completely there, the tour just keeps going.

In the best case, then, you lose nothing at all. In the worst case - if the crash really happens in the very last second-window - a few metres are missing that fell between two saves. That's a very acceptable trade against “the whole tour is gone”.

Why this mattered to us

Tourtagebuch exists so that your tours are preserved - that's the whole point of the thing. An app that can lose a two-hour ride because you happen to make the wrong swipe at the wrong moment flatly contradicts that promise. A recorded tour should be as robust as an entered one: once captured, it stays.

That the feature came out of one of my own mishaps actually fits rather well. The best improvements often come from exactly the moments when you briefly want to shout at your phone.

In a nutshell

The app continuously saves your running recording on the device - every few seconds, at every pause and whenever it goes into the background. If it crashes or you swipe it away by mistake, it recognises the interrupted tour on the next launch and resumes it seamlessly if you wish. That turns “the whole tour is gone” into at most “a few missing metres” - and usually not even that.