My favorite app
I have been using Gyroscope that has the Places feature built-in since 2018. It is tracking your movements, using the phone’s GPS and fetching names and descriptions of the locations from FourSquare or you can add your own custom places. You can then open it and find all the countries, cities and places you visited in the past and the modes of transportation you’ve been using. It has the visual timeline, the travel “passport”, analytics, etc. It was doing a good job for me, although I was not using all the features of Gyroscope (which is a much more comprehensive life and well-being coach app). So I was excited to see Places launched as a standalone app.
I must say, they did terrific job improving the already good app. Accuracy improved even more, many more icons for different types of places are being added automatically, which makes it nice to see and differentiate the locations at the first glance. Types of movement and modes of transportation are easy to select between if necessary.
So many improvements that make the use that much more pleasant have been added. For example, before, the app could log as a visit a stop where a bus idled a few minutes or where you spent time in a traffic jam. Now, in the settings, you can choose not to log stops shorter than five minutes. That alone streamlines the use significantly if you travel in a big city.
I have to mention the Support people. In the eight years that I’ve been using Gyroscope and Places, I had various occasions when I wanted to run something by Support. Every time it was a fast and pleasant experience. These people really stand behind their product.
To sum up: I highly recommend this app that is useful, efficient, beautiful, and well supported.
I must say, they did terrific job improving the already good app. Accuracy improved even more, many more icons for different types of places are being added automatically, which makes it nice to see and differentiate the locations at the first glance. Types of movement and modes of transportation are easy to select between if necessary.
So many improvements that make the use that much more pleasant have been added. For example, before, the app could log as a visit a stop where a bus idled a few minutes or where you spent time in a traffic jam. Now, in the settings, you can choose not to log stops shorter than five minutes. That alone streamlines the use significantly if you travel in a big city.
I have to mention the Support people. In the eight years that I’ve been using Gyroscope and Places, I had various occasions when I wanted to run something by Support. Every time it was a fast and pleasant experience. These people really stand behind their product.
To sum up: I highly recommend this app that is useful, efficient, beautiful, and well supported.
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Jjust_another_user_29
Longtime Gyroscope User
Big fan of the separated Places app! Good job to the Gyroscope team.
TGThe Original Gattato
Love this app and idea!
I’ve been using Places on and off for years but this new update is 10/10! It’s very cool to see how I spend my time (and perhaps how boring my life is). I think a cool improvement would be having the ability to export super high res versions of the map so I could print an entire year of movement!
JLJonathon L.
Pretty but frustrating
This app is plagued by annoyances.
It can’t handle multimodal transportation (e.g. walking to the bus). If I hang out somewhere random taking pictures, it simply will not accept that I might not want to name that arbitrary place—the only option is deleting the stop from my timeline entirely. If my GPS drifts while sitting at work, it thinks I went for a walk, and removing that from my timeline leaves a gap. It consistently guesses that a new place I visit is some garden I went to once, five blocks away, rather than any businesses that actually exist in the vicinity. If you stop by somewhere briefly enough it doesn’t detect it, you can convert the *entire travel* to a visit, but not just the period you actually spent at the place (so instead of walking, visit, walking back, you simply teleported and spent much longer at the place).
There’s more, but anyway, you get the idea. On the plus side, it looks nice, and doesn’t seem to use that much battery.
The pricing is also kind of wild considering everything happens on my device — if it actually worked, I’d even be willing to spend multiple dollars a month on it, but $100/year is crazy! But regardless, based on my experience so far, I’ll have to keep searching for alternatives.
It can’t handle multimodal transportation (e.g. walking to the bus). If I hang out somewhere random taking pictures, it simply will not accept that I might not want to name that arbitrary place—the only option is deleting the stop from my timeline entirely. If my GPS drifts while sitting at work, it thinks I went for a walk, and removing that from my timeline leaves a gap. It consistently guesses that a new place I visit is some garden I went to once, five blocks away, rather than any businesses that actually exist in the vicinity. If you stop by somewhere briefly enough it doesn’t detect it, you can convert the *entire travel* to a visit, but not just the period you actually spent at the place (so instead of walking, visit, walking back, you simply teleported and spent much longer at the place).
There’s more, but anyway, you get the idea. On the plus side, it looks nice, and doesn’t seem to use that much battery.
The pricing is also kind of wild considering everything happens on my device — if it actually worked, I’d even be willing to spend multiple dollars a month on it, but $100/year is crazy! But regardless, based on my experience so far, I’ll have to keep searching for alternatives.
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AWAgnes Nutter, Witch
Response from developer
Hi Agnes! So sorry about that, we just added some new fixes and custom settings for these issues in the latest update including the ability to hide short stops automatically if you'd like to try it out.
Dispendieux mais très intéressant
Il y a de belles fonctions et le design de l’app est super, je trouve par contre cela dispendieux. Je pense que c’est plus adressé à des exécutifs
STStéphane Thinel
