I notice that the Arc Timeline Recorder has gone live in the US App Store.
I now have three Arc apps on my phone.
I know I have to have Arc Timeline open (the main app) and I’m sure the new Arc Timeline Recorder needs to be open. What do I do with our old friend Arc Mini?
Thanks for a great product!
Oh, you beat me to the announcement post! 
I started writing up an announcement yesterday, then had to jump to something else, so didn’t finish posting it.
I’m still trying to decide this one myself. Personally, I don’t really have a use for Mini anymore. I’ve never liked its UI - it’s always felt more clunky than Arc Timeline’s. And given that Arc Recorder is small and simple enough that iOS should be very unlikely to terminate it, I think just Arc Recorder and Arc Timeline should be enough, for protection from data gaps.
I’m going to keep Mini installed on my main phone, because I still have to test it, and keep updating it, because plenty of people do use it. But yeah, I don’t really see much point in keeping it around for most people now, unless they genuinely do like using its UI.
Arc Recorder is better suited as a fallback for data gap protection. And you would hope that running two apps is enough - three feels like overkill, for data gap protection.
Thanks! 
I’ve also started in on Arc Timeline Editor - a ground up rebuild of Arc Timeline, built all in modern SwiftUI, so that I can get rid of lots of old crufty code and UI bugs. I’m hopeful that progress will go fast, because all of the new features I’ve added to Arc Timeline in the past year or so were already built in SwiftUI, so I should be able to just port those across almost unchanged, only leaving behind the older non-SwiftUI code.
Should Arc Recorder have recording mode toggled on when using it as a backup to Arc?
@shamam Yep! Recording on for both apps.
That “Start recording” / “Stop recording” button is actually tied to the same setting in both apps. So it you stop recording in one app, it’ll stop it in both apps, and ditto starting recording. Recording on/off is a shared setting between the two apps.
So you pretty much can’t stop one and leave the other going - stopping one will stop both.
Hi @matt ,
Sorry for digging up this old thread. I just discovered the existence of Arc Timeline Recorder.
I’m a bit confused what it is for, even after reading this announcement. I’m new to Arc Timeline, and I have been using it for a few weeks now.
From what I can gather so far, Arc Recorder is there to help with filling in data gaps that are the result of Arc Timeline getting terminated in the background on our phone?
So far, Arc Timeline has been able to record my locations and movements throughout the day without any issues, but I do have to edit the timeline at the end of the day to confirm things. Do I still need to download Arc Recorder?
Sorry if it’s a stupid question!
Thanks,
James
Hi again @jameszhan!
Glad to hear Arc Timeline hasn’t been getting terminated yet. Although unfortunately that won’t last forever. As your database gets bigger, Arc’s data processing workload will get more hefty, and at times that will mean that iOS gets angry with it and terminates it in the background. And that’s where Arc Recorder comes in.
Because Arc Recorder only has the job of recording, and nothing else, it never gets energy/battery expensive or memory expensive. It’s always got a very low profile, which means iOS never gets angry or picks on it. It gets left alone to do its thing quietly in the background, for days or weeks at a time without interruption.
Then when Arc Timeline meets iOS’s wrath and gets terminated, Arc Recorder will be sitting there ready to take over, making sure there’s no gaps in your timeline data.
There’s effectively no extra energy/battery cost of having both installed and running. When one of them is recording the other stays in a “standby” mode, using as little energy as possible. So it doesn’t really add up to any shorter battery life. It’s an effectively free safety protection from data gaps in your timeline - no downside.
So yeah, definitely worth installing it at some point, and leaving it running. There’s nothing worse than getting a big data gap over some period of time you really wanted recorded, like a fun hike of cycling trip or some such. Better to have Arc Recorder there, ready to jump in if needed.
Thanks @matt ! This is good to know.
Might be a good idea to include this info somewhere in the Arc Timeline app to get people to install the Arc Recorder? I wouldn’t have known about this if I didn’t visit this forum and checked out some of the older threads!
I have installed the Arc Timeline Recorder, and gave it permission to always use the location. However, now the iOS indicator of an app using location (blue bubble on the top left corner of the screen) is always there.
Is this the intended behavior? I wouldn’t want that indicator to always be on.
I definitely agree. It’s been on my todos for a long time to add something to Arc Timeline app, for exactly that purpose! I’ll nudge the issue in the issue tracker, to remind me to get to it soon.
Unfortunately it’s Apple’s intended behaviour, but not ours 
Apple took away the choice, so that apps (using the latest APIs) no longer get the choice of opting out of that Dynamic Island / status bar indicator.
In the much older APIs there’s a setting I can use to opt out of it. But Apple a few years ago changed is to that if you did that, the app was essentially punished, being much more likely to be terminated in the background (or alternatively will use much more battery - both options being terrible). So the old approach wasn’t viable anymore. And then in the new APIs Apple added a couple of years ago they took away the option completely.
Arc Timeline app uses the old APIs, and defaults to the “use much more battery” approach. There’s also toggle in Arc’s Privacy settings to turn the indicator on, to avoid that extra battery use.
Arc Recorder app uses the new APIs, and doesn’t get to have the choice at all (not that either option was a good one).
So… basically we’re cornered into having an always-present indicator that we really don’t want. Only Apple can change that, and the chances of them listening to us is roughly zero.
Kind of uncool. But there’s nothing we can do about it 
Thanks for the explanation! It’s good for me as a user to know.
I have decided to uninstall Arc Recorder because I just can’t stand the indicator being on all the time—I would rather risk data gaps. I hope Apple makes an update for this in the future!