GPS Tips

Slopes uses GPS to track and record your activities. GPS (Global Positioning System) works by connecting the chip in your phone to overhead satellites and is used to identify location, speed, distance, and more. While GPS works everywhere in the world and under most weather conditions, bad GPS reception can happen occasionally. This can be down to a random loss of connection to satellites or an external factor such as your proximity to dense trees or tall buildings, heavy cloud cover, or even just having your phone buried deep at the bottom of your backpack.

Cool fact - your device generally needs to receive signal from around 5 satellites to get an accurate estimate of its location.

To get the most out of Slopes and make sure you capture every awesome minute of your days skiing and snowboarding, you need to make sure that your device has a strong GPS fix before you start recording.

Luckily, there's a few things you can do to avoid GPS issues. Most of the time your device can get a good GPS signal within around 10 seconds. But if you're having issues, you can try the following:

Make sure you're outside; being indoors can degrade the accuracy of your phone's GPS.
Let Slopes get a good GPS fix before you turn off cell data or WiFi as those can speed up the acquisition process.
Turn your phone off and on.
Turn off GPS for approximately 30 seconds, then turn it back on.
Remove the phone case - occasionally a phone case can affect your device getting a good GPS signal.

Device Specific Troubleshooting

We are aware of users having trouble while recording on some Android phones. The issues are usually due to device settings that can interfere with Slopes receiving GPS signal, which stops us from being able to record your activity.

The reported behavior includes:

Missing lifts and/or runs
Nothing being recorded at all
Inaccurate stats

If you're experiencing any of the above, running through the troubleshooting steps specific to your device should get things working as expected. We have listed below the most popular Android OEMs, but if yours is not here, please send us a help request from within the app by tapping here and we will assist.