Does Polarsteps work at sea? – Polarsteps

Wherever you are in the world, you can always add steps to your trip. However, when you are at sea, Travel Tracker steps (the small, white dots), which are added to your route through automatic tracking, may behave slightly differently than on land.

Steps added manually work as usual.
Travel Tracker steps (the small, white dots) may appear less often (or not at all) while you are offshore, depending on your device and Travel Tracker settings.
Travel Tracker steps may occasionally appear in the wrong place by accident. This happens when your device uses Wi-Fi networks (common on cruises) or cell towers back on land instead of GPS. On Android, if GPS isn’t available, your phone may fall back on Wi-Fi or cellular signals to determine location. This can provide inaccurate locations.

Polarsteps at sea for iOS users

At the moment, Polarsteps on iOS does not use GPS functionalities. Therefore, tracking at sea is not supported. However, it's on our roadmap and we hope to add this in the future for all iPhone users. We do have a nice little workaround for those PROs who can't wait any longer:

Pro Tip: If you turn on a navigation app, such as Google Maps, and use navigation in the background of your device, then Polarsteps can also use these GPS locations to track your route more accurately.

Polarsteps at sea for Android users

Yes, if you set your Travel Tracker mode to 'High accuracy' the Travel Tracker does work at sea. You will find more info on the different Travel Tracker modes here: How does the Travel Tracker work?

Possible issues

If you see inaccurate Travel Tracker steps or lines in your trip

Due to how the Travel Tracker receives locations from your device, there can be cases where you see clusters of Travel Tracker steps placed in the wrong location, causing inaccurate lines to be drawn.

Example

If you see inaccurate Travel Tracker steps clustered in a single (inaccurate) location, you can fix these by doing the following:

Zoom in on the cluster (often at the departure port or other specific location).
Tap/click a white dot → Trashbin.
Are these hard to select on mobile? Log in at polarsteps.com, zoom in, then delete it there.

You can read more about fixing issues with inaccurate lines here: What to do if you see an incorrect line in your trip?

If your cruise line is going through land or your route is otherwise inaccurate

Unfortunately, it's not possible to add the small, white dots (Travel Tracker steps) on your map manually. These are added automatically, and we currently can't add them afterwards. You can only decide to add a manual 'big' step in between the locations so that your route will be more accurate. You don't have to add any photos in this step if you don't want to. You can just create a step on your timeline by clicking on the little + icon and add a location.

Still need help?

If you need further help, feel free to contact us here.