Shocker. I emailed developer and got response that there is NO support other than a forum?? I find app extremely useful but why on earth is my activity only tracked as “BIKING”??? Find that irritating as hell. I just need to know where I’ve been. Doesn’t matter how I got there. Any reason for this??
Hi @JoeMinor!
The reason why I emailed you to use the support forum, and why there is no email support, is because this app is a one person team: me. I have to split my time between customer support and building and maintaining the app. Which means I have to make best use of customer support time, so that there’s still time left for the rest!
Email support means responding to each person individually, even if they all have the same question. Whereas when responding to a question here on the forum I can respond once, and then everyone else with the same question can come to see their question already answered.
That’s more efficient for both me and the users, and also better for both.
Arc is a “learning engine”, or “machine learning”. That means that every time you correct one of its mistakes, it learns from that and knows better for next time.
When you first install the app it doesn’t know you, it doesn’t know where you go or how you get there. But over time, based on your feedback with confirmations and corrections, it learns your patterns in great detail. That allows it to automatically choose the most correct activity types and place assignments automatically.
If you have a look in the Settings tab in Arc, then “Introducing Arc App”, the “INTRO 1” also explains this. It would have been presented to you on as a banner at the top of the timeline view after you first installed the app. However I’m happy to also explain it to you here! That’s what the support forum is for.
There’s no email support but Matt is incredibly easy to get in touch with here — as you can see!
I’ve had similar discussions with other Arc users regarding the classification system (and tagging work it entails) being more work than the value they get out of it. Personally, I enjoy knowing how I got to a place, but it could be interesting to give users a setting that turns all of this off and visually simplifies the app to location only — I imagine most of the data processing would stick around in the background should they ever choose to toggle it back on.
Whenever requests for a simplified app come up I tend to point people to competitors. Things like Google Timeline (though that also requires some manual classification work, to get full value out of it).
Basically there’s a bunch of apps that do this kind of thing, and they each target different levels of detail in their timelines. Arc is intentionally designed to aim for the highest detail (and accuracy) possible, given current iPhone hardware. It’s not meant to be all things to all people.
Though the catch there with the various competitors is … we all have the same problem with accuracy: It’s very hard (read: impossible) to get everything right first time, regardless of whether you’re targeting peak detail or extremely simplified timelines. Accuracy is on a separate spectrum from detail, and pushing up on the accuracy is an incredibly difficult problem for all of the apps.
Though the simpler apps can kind of “hide” their accuracy problems by way of there just being less there in the timelines to notice mistakes in. And some of them also get around it perceptually by not having a map ever-present.
If there’s no map on the screen it’s easier to “trust” what you see in the timeline list and assume it’s roughly correct, even when it’s in reality wildly wrong. The map makes it much harder to “hide” mistakes. With Arc, if it’s got something wrong, you’re probably gonna know - you can see it all there.
But Arc doesn’t just aim for highest detail, it also aims for highest accuracy. I occasionally comparison test various competitor apps, and each time I do I fail to find any app that’s doing a more accurate job than Arc. They’re basically all making at best just as much of a mess as Arc, and typically have significantly worse timeline accuracy. It’s a very hard thing to do with high accuracy!
So yeah I think that boils down to the issue with Arc’s confirms/corrects work being tedious being a necessary tedium, unless you just don’t care whether it gets things right or not. And Arc is very much targeted at the people who do care whether the timeline is correct or not. Or at least that’s my intent with it.
Oh, going off on a bit of a tangent now, but this segues into something I’ve been cogitating on a bit lately: the eventual use of mini/local LLMs in the timeline processing. iPhones now have “Foundation Models”, built in AI on the phone that apps can easily make use of internally.
Basically the current classification and processing engines are doing roughly as good as is possible given the information they have. The classification is as good as is possible given classifier algorithms and the available data. The processing engine is making the best possible sense of Trips and Visits, etc.
But then we have to use our brains to do the final cleanup, applying our human knowledge. That’s where a local LLM/AI could come in. Those have some degree of human-like intelligence, and there’s a chance some of that cleanup work could be done automatically by an AI on the phone, looking at the timeline data, the items requiring confirm/correct, and saying “Ok well I can see what’s the obvious thing to do here”.
That’s something I want to start experimenting with at some point this year. Could be quite cool!
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Optimizing for your target market makes sense here, and I’m it so hey, no complaints! 
…But I don’t think I agree with your assessment. What I’m thinking of here is that you too can introduce a toggle switch to hide Arc’s accuracy problems which could lead to a better experience for users that don’t care about travel mode and only care about locations. If that’s worth the development time and additional maintnance complexity for future features (having to design the app around this being a user option) is something I suspect you’ve already made up your mind about — and hey, fair enough!
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For users who only care about Places/Visits, never Trips, there’s actually a bunch of (well maybe a few) apps out there that I think do a pretty decent job of that.
The reason being those apps can rely almost solely on iOS Location Services’ “Visit monitoring” functionality. Which is … well, it’s not great, for a bunch of reasons, but the end results are I think Good Enough for most people’s needs. The accuracy is Good Enough.
Ok now I’m struggling to think of the names of those apps. Hmm. Maybe Life Cycle is one of them? I feel like there’s several more, but their names aren’t coming to mind just now…
Basically what makes Arc so much more challenging to do well (and any app that wants to maintain at least semi accurate timelines of both Trips and Visits) is that you really need recording to start nearly immediately when you leave a Visit/Place. You want Trip recording from as close as possible to the moment you step out the door. iOS’s “Visit monitoring” can’t do that - it’s many minutes delayed in reporting. Like, it might not report until 15 minutes later, and at that point a Trip between Visits could already be over - a complete fail on Trip data recording.
But Visit monitoring does tend to get arrival and leaving times accurate enough, for most people’s use cases. So yeah, if that’s all someone wants - they don’t care about the details of the trips between places, then those apps are going to do a good enough job for them.
Damn, I really wish I could think of some other app names. It’s actually been quite a while since I’ve surveyed the apps / competitors landscape. I tend to only do it when I hear about something new, and that hasn’t happened in a while. Maybe some other people here will be aware of other apps of that kind…
Dawarich is a newer one that seems pretty close to Arc in terms of features but I haven’t given it a go. Probably worth a look tho if you’ve never checked it out!
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I’ll give that one a try! Hadn’t seen it before.
Unfortunately there’s a fairly well worn route for these various competitors. Someone realises they’ve got a good idea, starts building it without surveying the landscape of existing apps, gets a fair way into it before realising it’s actually significantly more difficult than they thought, then … eventually it becomes abandonware or fades into obscurity. (Though to be fair, Arc itself is pretty obscure! Kind of a niche within a niche).
My hunch is that the Life Cycle alike apps have a better chance. It’s technologically simpler, and developers of those can focus on UI and UX instead of spending their entire time dealing with the complexities of continuous location recording and auto timeline construction/processing/classifying.