Live location S+ app

Dušan Ković

Today I went for a climbing, and on one part of the approach I had to go through 50m of a tunnel. In the tunnel watch lost gps signal, after the tunnel it regained the signal but live location on the watch showed Disconnected:99 and never reconnected. Also, Live location app in the phone (android) showed Waiting for device (or similar). I had to stop suunto plus app and enable it again, after which it worked fine. Problem is that it detected reconnect qs a new session and deleted red track I had in the live location map until tunnel.

It would be great if devices reconnected automatically. Also it would be great if live location app retained the track in the map if suunto exercise on the watch wasn’t turned off.

Thanks

Nikolai Simonov

Hi @Dušan-Ković Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback!

About the Disconnected:99 message, it likely happened because the watch lost connection with the phone for a longer period. Usually, if the disconnect is just a few seconds, the connection is restored automatically. But if it lasts longer, the S+ SDK doesn’t give us direct control over the BTLE connection, so we have to rely on the watch itself to reconnect and sometimes it doesn’t manage to do so.

Really good point about the new workout/session being started after reconnection, that’s something we might be able to improve on our side, at least in how the mobile app handles reconection. I’ll look into making mobile handle more careful reconnection state.

peegee

@Nikolai-Simonov
Nikolai, can’t even start to tell you how happy I am with this great feature, my wife is even much happier knowing now exactly where I’m spending my nights…
Do you have a list of supported SOS countries?
I’m specifically interested with an Israeli number.
I am an iOS user and get a message that we are not supported, on the other hand, a distinguished friend @Danny-poleg of mine, an android user has managed to use the feature.
Is this an iOS / android issue? Or perhaps something else?

Nikolai Simonov

Hey! @peegee

Big cheers to your wife! May she never worry again about your mysterious night missions!

regarding SOS messages you’re right to notice the difference. For iOS, we rely fully on cloud-based SMS delivery, and due to cost and provider limitations, we currently support most of the EU and the US. Unfortunately, Israel isn’t supported yet, but we’re actively working to expand coverage, hope to include it soon!

On Android, it’s bit more flexible, if the app is installed outside of Google Play (via direct APK or APKPure), it can send SMS messages directly from the device, without going through our cloud, this option simply isn’t available on iOS due to system restrictions.

Danny poleg

@Nikolai-Simonov

Two things

I installed the app by downloading the APK file because it didn’t give an option through Google Play here in Israel.
I told @peegee that Android is better than IOS

Antoine

Now available in PlayStore in France.
Will the sms feature soon available in PlayStore ?

Nikolai Simonov

@Antoine Oh! great!

As for the SMS feature in the PlayStore version I’m trying to solve google’s restrictions around SMS permissions. It’s been a bit of a bureaucratic challenge, so I can’t promise anything yet… but I’m working on it.

jw cou

@Nikolai-Simonov I’m just very curious to understand how you make money with this app (and you definitely should!), if it’s not confidential of course?
Is Suunto helping to support the recurring costs?

As I said, pure personal curiosity and I side with all the happy users of this app to thank you a million times for your work!

isazi

@Antoine still not available in the Netherlads

Nikolai Simonov

@jw-cou

That’s no secret right now I’m not monetizing the app at all.

It won’t chang at least the next 2–3 months. After that, I’m going to introduce a few subscription options. There will be a free kinda “core” plan, which includes everything that’s already in the app today and other features coming soon. In addition, I’m planning to launch a premium plan with extended functionality. It will likely include things like a extended SLA, team support ant other advanced things, aimed at more demanding or professional use cases. Nothing exact at this time, I’ll share details later.

I’ve thought about other monetization channels too, but for now I’ve decided to go with this model keeping the basics free and building optional premium features on top.

Thanks a lot for the warm words really great to hear!

Nikolai Simonov

@isazi That’s strange, it should be available as an early access version.
In the meantime, could you try joining the early access directly via this link? - https://play.google.com/apps/testing/one.athletica.live

isazi

@Nikolai-Simonov it is available in the Netherlands from today

Dušan Ković

@Nikolai-Simonov I did another test while climbing in the mountains. Disconnected:99 happened again, although I didn’t have any interruptions. I am not sure what is the cause for this, but when it happens it doesn’t reconnect. My phone is Pixel 6.

Antoine

@Nikolai-Simonov said in Live location S+ app:

@Francesco-Pagano @Miroslava @SergioB

I’ve investigated the issue that, when Suunto App (SA) is running, a Live.τ session on the watch may unexpectedly disconnect and immediately reconnect every 60-90 seconds. also the same issue if SA lost connection with watch.

TL;DR: Unfortunately, this is a limitation we cannot fully solve from the Live.τ side alone.

⸻

The root of the conflict (without diving deep into tech):

The watch can hold only one “live” Bluetooth link to the phone at a time.

When SA wakes up in the background to sync, the watch switches that link over to SA.

Live.τ also needs the same Bluetooth link to stream your track in real time. When SA grabs the link, Live.τ’s session is dropped.

This happens only on Android. On iOS, Suunto App is far more restricted in the background and doesn’t run a permanent service, so the conflict doesn’t appear.

Together, these points explain the periodic disconnect/reconnect behavior you may see.

In practice this shouldn’t break your recording: the S+ app on the watch reconnects in about a second—essentially one event-loop tick—so no data should be lost. Still, the reconnection is a little annoying and does cost a tiny bit of extra battery.

⸻

How can we ease the conflict?

Because Suunto App (SA) and Live.τ vie for the same Bluetooth connection, the real limitation lives inside the watch’s BLE firmware.

Temporarily stopping SA’s background service would prevent the clash, but Android doesn’t allow one app to shut down another; In addition I’ve not found any way to stop this service via SA UI, if somebody know how to do that, please let me know it could be a basic recommendation.

Disabling “Discovery” on the watch probably won’t help: SA already has a bonded connection to the watch, and during an active workout the watch generally doesn’t advertise itself anyway, so SA can still reclaim the link.

Ideally we could cooperate with SA e.g., send it an some kind intent that saying “Live.τ is taking the connection now; please pause sync”, however that would require close collaboration with Suunto’s app team.

⸻

What we’ve done so far

In the latest release, Live.τ now shows silent reconnection notifications so the pop-ups are less distracting. For now that’s all we can do.

Does it mean that if sync is very long (with many routes to sync for example) we can have the disconnected message 99 ?
Is there a workaround to avoid this temporarily ?
Using an another phone without SA solves the problem?

Nikolai Simonov

@Dušan-Ković Oh that’s unfortunate to hear!

It’s possible that Suunto App is causing some kind of conflict, but I can’t say for sure yet. I’ll definitely try to reproduce this on a similar setup to see what’s going on behind the scenes, however… Let’s see what I can do…

Thanks a lot for pointing it out!
I’ll let you know if I find anything useful.

Nikolai Simonov

@Antoine

As far as I understand, suunto app shouldn’t be doing any heavy syncing during a workout, just light background comms, like notifications or smth. So in theory, that shouldn’t cause a disconnect:99, but I can’t fully rule it out yet.

So, I’ll need to investigate deeper to understand what might be triggering this.

Nikolai Simonov

Meanwhile…

Live.τ has been live for one week!
Thanks to everyone who has already tried the app and shared impressions!

To decide where to focus next, we’ve put together a short survey that takes just a couple of minutes. Your answers will help us:

spot the most useful features;
gauge interest in premium options and see which ones matter most;
settle on a fair price for advanced plans.

Survey: https://app.youform.com/forms/2z4hpvm1

Huge thanks and happy training!

Sebastian Wagner 0

@Nikolai-Simonov thx for the live Location App. Great Feature. One of the few i missed from my garmin. I could only test shortly the Connection. A run or bike activity will follow.

Keep up the Great work

Nikolai Simonov

A little update announcement:

This morning we rolled out an update (1.0.9) for those using the app via TestFlight or who downloaded the APK (you need to download the new one) directly.

In this update, we’re testing email sending functionality.
You’ll find a new section under:

Settings → Emergency Contact → Email Settings

it will be available in play and app store later