Live location S+ app

SergioB

Tested today with a 2h bike ride, with Suunto Race and Android 13 on a 3 years old Motorola smartphone.
Everything worked well!
Battery consumption on the smartphone was 7%
After stopping the activity and reopening Suunto App to look at the stats, I noticed the watch was unpaired (and I thought it had disconnected at the beginning of the activity because I didn’t receive any notification during my ride, despite founding them on the smartphone)

Btw for me the app is great!

Nikolai Simonov

@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.

panadero

Hi Folks!

Are you was also super excited about this live location feature. How did you manage to install it?

I tried to install it as usual. In the iPhone App shows as installed and loaded in my Suunto Race. However, it doesn’t show up in the SuuntoPlus menu when setting up the activity in the watch.

Of course my watch is not connecting to the new live.T app.

Tried to install/uninstall the LiveLocation (as well as other S+ apps) but doesn’t seem to solve the issue. Did a soft reset already.

Did u experience something similar?

Thx

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.

Hello,
Thanks !
I am wondering if using a Bluetooth device (like a heart rate sensor) might increase disconnections.
How do you update the app? Do we need to download it again? (Not yet available in playstore)

Francesco Pagano

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

What we’ve done so far

In the latest release, Live.τ now shows silent reconnection notifications

@Nikolai-Simonov does it mean the app has been updated? I checked PlayStore and didn’t find a new version. After your previous post, I disabled app notifications from the system settings, and now I noticed that the app requires notifications permissions when I launch it, otherwise it won’t move to the home screen
Thanks again for looking into this issue and for the details you’re providing

safari

Hello, the area in the image comes with the results of the training. What is the meaning of this SID code?

duffman19

@Nikolai-Simonov I just used the app for an activity and none of my phone’s notifications came through to the watch. That is, I didn’t see any text or phone calls on the watch. When I stopped the activity, they all came through at once. Is this expected behavior or due to the update you mentioned above attempting to silence the live.t app notifications? Not receiving phone notifications would be less safe and convenient in my case.

(Really appreciate your work, btw.)

Edit: I’m on iOS

Nikolai Simonov

@Antoine

Using external Bluetooth devices like HR monitors, Stryd, or CORE shouldn’t cause any disconnection issues they work independently and don’t interfere with the watch-to-phone connection.

As for updates:
You can still download the latest version as an APK from the website.
Are there no google play version at all? It probably should be live, since yesterday.

The update is currently under review in the Play Store — usually, Google takes a day or two to approve updates.

Nikolai Simonov

@safari

Great question, the SID code isn’t used for anything just yet.

In the future, when we introduce login via Suunto feature, this code will help link the Live.t session with your Suunto workout.

Nikolai Simonov

@duffman19

That’s an interesting observation. I haven’t seen this behavior on iOS before, but I’ll definitely look into it.

Btw, the recent update that silences notifications was only for Android.

It’s possible this is related to how iOS handles background btle connections during an active session, but I’ll do some testing to confirm.

duffman19

@Nikolai-Simonov Thank you, sir. I should also mention that I’m on a very old version is iOS (15.8.4) on an even older original iPhone SE 2016. Not sure if that’s relevant.

Antoine

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

@Antoine

Using external Bluetooth devices like HR monitors, Stryd, or CORE shouldn’t cause any disconnection issues they work independently and don’t interfere with the watch-to-phone connection.

As for updates:
You can still download the latest version as an APK from the website.
Are there no google play version at all? It probably should be live, since yesterday.

The update is currently under review in the Play Store — usually, Google takes a day or two to approve updates.

Thanks for the answer.
For playstore (France): it is written “available soon”.
I tested LiveTracking yesterday during a 4-hour trail run.
After analyzing the FIT file, the watch’s battery doesn’t seem to have been used excessively:
It went from 97% down to 91%.
I estimate (depending on the method used) about 60 hours of battery life (the weather was sunny, and with these same settings, I usually get around 65 hours of battery life).
Needs to be tested on a longer outing…

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