Recently I started to get reports about the Hiker App recording shorter distance than the actual. Finally I could communicate with a user who experienced this on their Vivoactive 5 and they sent me the link to their activity. The records shows distance as 5.1miles while the user claims it was 6.67miles. Looking at it on the Garmin Connect website this is what I see:
1. When looking at the graphs and the map "by Time" they all look right *. The map has a round route, and the elevation climbs up then back to the same elevation where it started, etc.
2. When I switch to "by DIstance", then the graphs get "cropped". When I follow them and look at the map I can see the pointer on the map going on the path, and then stops in the middle. All the graphs (HR, pace, cadence, etc) are the same.
*) So all the graphs in the "by Time" view have 2 hours 30 minutes "width", the only interesting thing I can see when looking "by Time" is that around the same point where the graphs end in the "by Distance" view, the graphs on the "by Time" view are a bit unstable. There's a 12 minute section where the pace has some gaps, the cadence has some more dots above and under the "average". I can even see from the "GPS accuracy" graph that the accuracy was 4 for the whole 2:30, even during those 12 minutes.
So it looks like the watch did record the data, even the GPS coordinates look correct, it's on the path, the sensors did record data for most of the 2h30m (the last half an hour was totally normal on all of them) but somehow the distance reported by the watch misses the last ~40 minutes.
My app does have experimental "auto pause", but it's disabled for this user, and even if that would kick in it would have a similar effect on the recorded data as stopping the activity, and then 12 minutes later resuming it (it uses session.stop(), session.start()), so I rule that or any related possible bug out because if that would happen then we wouldn't see the graphs during the "paused" period.
Did anyone ever got similar reports? Any idea if this can be somehow fixed by me?
All I can think is that there might be some Garmin bug, as my app doesn't have anything to do with the distance calculation, recording, it's all being done by the watch.
