Recording activities

How DerbyOn tracks a walk, run or ride — and why the distance it credits is sometimes a little different from what your phone showed.

On this page

Starting a session
Solo or for a challenge
What you see while recording
Recording with your phone locked
Recording without signal
What counts, and what doesn't
Flagged sessions
Limits worth knowing

Starting a session #

Tap the play button in the middle of the bottom bar, then START ACTIVITY.

Before you start, the screen tells you two things:

STATUS — READY, WAITING, STARTING… or RECORDING….
GPS SIGNAL — STRONG, WEAK, OFF, or GPS ACCESS NEEDED if the permission is missing.

Wait for GPS SIGNAL: STRONG before you start, especially indoors or between tall buildings. Starting on a weak signal is the usual reason the first few hundred metres of a walk go missing.

The record screen while a session is running, showing time, distance and GPS signal — Recording, with the active challenge at the top

Solo or for a challenge #

Every session is recorded either for a challenge or as a solo activity.

	Solo session	Challenge session
Pick the activity	Yes — you choose	No — set by the challenge
Counts toward lifetime distance	Yes	Yes
Earns XP	Yes	Yes
Builds streaks and records	Yes	Yes
Moves you along a route	No	Yes
Affects the leaderboard	No	Yes

Use the floating button above the tab bar to switch between Solo and your active races before you start recording.

You can't move a session to a different challenge once it's running. If you started recording against the wrong one, stop the session and start a new one — the app will tell you the same thing if you try.

You can only have one recording at a time. Starting a new session automatically closes any session you forgot to stop.

What you see while recording #

TIME — elapsed time, as H:MM:SS.
DISTANCE — in metres below a kilometre, then kilometres.
Your challenge — name, route and progress, if you're recording for one.
GPS signal — so you know whether it's still tracking well.

On the Map tab you also get your live position, the route ahead, how far is left, nearby rivals, your rank, and checkpoints as you reach them.

DerbyOn is metric: metres and kilometres, and speed in km/h rather than a min/km pace. There's no imperial setting.

Recording with your phone locked #

You don't need to keep the app open, and you shouldn't have to keep the screen on. Once a session is running you can lock your phone and put it in a pocket — recording continues.

On iPhone, a Live Activity shows distance, time and the challenge on your lock screen, with a stop button.
On Android, an ongoing notification does the same.

This needs the background (“Always”) location permission. With only “While Using the App”, recording stops the moment you lock your phone. If your distances look far too low, this is almost always why — see permissions.

Battery optimisation on some Android phones can kill background tracking. If sessions keep cutting short, exclude DerbyOn from battery optimisation in your system settings.

Recording without signal #

Losing mobile data doesn't stop anything. GPS works without a network connection, so DerbyOn keeps recording and shows a banner telling you it's tracking offline.

Your location points are queued on the phone and sent with their original timestamps when you're back online, so nothing is lost and nothing is misdated.

Your position on the live map won't update for other racers while you're offline — it catches up once you reconnect.

What counts, and what doesn't #

DerbyOn checks every session, because a racing app only works if everyone's distance was actually earned. This runs automatically — there's nothing to turn on.

Your recording is examined in small segments, and only genuine movement for your activity earns distance and XP. Segments are not counted when:

the GPS fix is too inaccurate to trust
you're standing still, or the movement is just GPS drift on the spot
the speed or acceleration is beyond what's physically plausible for walking, running or cycling
the pattern looks like a car, bus or train rather than your own effort
your position jumps an impossible distance, or there's a long gap in the data
it's in the first few seconds while the GPS is still settling

This is also why the distance credited to a challenge can be a little lower than the live figure on your phone: the phone shows a running estimate, and the final number is confirmed afterwards against the whole session.

Short tunnels and built-up streets are handled — a brief stretch of poor signal is bridged if the rest of the data supports it. You don't need to do anything.

Credited distance and XP only ever move forward. A crash, a flat battery or a lost connection mid-session can't take away what you already earned.

Flagged sessions #

Occasionally a session is marked Flagged, and you may get a notification saying it needs review. It usually means part of the recording looked like vehicle travel or contained a GPS glitch.

A flag is not a penalty and it doesn't wipe your session. Crediting is worked out segment by segment, so a single bad stretch doesn't destroy the genuine movement around it. A dropped GPS fix on a train bridge shouldn't cost you an hour's walk, and it doesn't.

If you think a session was flagged wrongly, email us at muhshuh2000@gmail.com with the date and roughly where you were.

Limits worth knowing #

Limit	Value
Shortest session that will save	30 seconds
Longest single session	12 hours
Longest single session distance	500 km
Sessions running at once	One
Forgotten sessions	Closed automatically after 24 hours, and earn no XP

A session you leave running and never stop is closed after a day and doesn't earn XP — the data needed to score it fairly is gone by then. Get into the habit of tapping STOP ACTIVITY when you're done.