MyTracks was a

Global Positioning System The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...

(GPS) tracking application that ran on Android. The application used a device's GPS capabilities to collect data, allowing real-time review of path, speed, distance, and elevation. Later, this data could be saved to

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, or

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and shared with

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, or

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. The application also allowed a user to record annotations along the path, hear periodic voice announcements of progress, and sync with select third-party bio-metric sensors. In 2016, Google announced that MyTracks would be deprecated and no longer available in the

Google Play Store Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating sys ...

. An in-app popup alerted users that MyTracks would stop working on April 30, 2016;

History

The application made its debut on February 12, 2009 under a closed license. A year later on March 28, 2010,

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announced the

open-sourcing Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

of the application, stating that "The

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of the development community will create a more powerful, more intuitive, more useful, and more robust My Tracks." The first major re-haul of the application came on July 13, 2012 when Google released version 2.0. This introduced a new interface, support for playing back data in

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for Android, improved charts, and additional statistics. In 2014 the developers announced on the google code project site that My Tracks would no longer developed in the open and that the source code would be removed. The last open source version was 2.0.5 released in August 2013.

Reception

In September 2013, the

listed the application as being installed on 10,000,000 – 50,000,000 devices, with an overall rating of 4.4/5 from over 80,000 reviews.

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gave the application 4/5 stars, praising its "Chart, Statistics, and satellite playback" and ability to pause recordings but criticized it for an "unattractive interface" and lack of "athletic-specific features". PCWorld awarded MyTracks 5/5 stars, stating "this app is just about perfect. It is intuitive to use and very stable."

Forks

OpenTracks is an open-source fork launched in 2020.

External links

Former Development Site

OpenTracks

References

{{Android Android (operating system) software