u/Creepy_Virus231

Hallo zusammen!

Ich habe kürzlich mal einen Track samt Höhenprofil aufgezeichnet (Siehe Screenshots). Wie ihr seht war ich nicht all zu schnell unterwegs. Die Höhenprofile sind zwar ähnlich aber man kann bei der Barometer-Messung eine Drift erkennen, wovon ich auch schon gelesen hatte.

Prinzipiell war mir die Höhenmessung bisher immer ziemlich egal, aber kürzlich fragte ein User, ob ich nicht auch die "Stufen" wie Apple zählen könnte. Ich hab das jetzt erstmal, wie zu sehen, umgesetzt, bin aber persönlich, wie gesagt, noch nicht recht überzeugt von dem Nutzen.

Was meint ihr denn dazu? Nutzt ihr vertikale Streckenmessung bei euren Trainingseinheiten? Und falls ja, mit welchem Effekt?

Grüße

Hi!

As you can see, I’ve shared two screenshots from a hike where I tracked not only my horizontal GPS distance but also my vertical GPS and barometric distance. This is a new feature I wanted to try out, since some other hikers seemed really excited about it, but I’m not convinced yet—or maybe my test hike was just too boring ;]

I also noticed that the GPS vertical tracking is pretty inaccurate for the actual distances, while the barometer drifts over time (see the offset between start and end in the graph). However, the screenshots only use the barometer readings for the calculated vertical distance (bottom right).

Some other Redditors mentioned that other apps calculate “stair steps” from the vertical distances, and there seems to be a bit of a trend to count these steps in addition to your own.

So am I the only one who isn’t convinced yet, or am I just too old-fashioned??? ;]

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I’ve been working on a solo-developed Android/iOS fitness app called Simple Stepper, and over the last months I ran into some surprisingly difficult problems around both activity tracking and monetization.

One thing that always bothered me about most step counter apps is that they mostly ignore elevation. Walking uphill, climbing stairs, or hiking feels very different from walking on flat ground, but smartphones make vertical tracking difficult:

• GPS altitude is noisy
• Barometers drift over time
• Different devices behave completely differently

On Android, I recently started experimenting with combining GPS + barometer data during workouts to estimate elevation more realistically. It’s still very much a work in progress, but the results are already interesting enough that I decided to ship it and gather real-world feedback instead of endlessly tuning it in isolation.

On the monetization side, I also learned a lot recently.

A few app versions ago, my AdMob request count suddenly exploded while match rate and eCPM dropped noticeably. After digging into it, I realized I was effectively over-requesting ads in some UI flows due to aggressive preloading behavior.

I redesigned large parts of the ad-loading logic:

• less unnecessary preloading
• more stable buffering
• fewer redundant requests
• better timing for native/interstitial loading

After that, requests dropped significantly and revenue performance improved.

I also integrated mediation with Meta Audience Network and Unity Ads. Meta was especially confusing at first because it took quite a while before impressions actually started appearing, even though bid requests and wins were already visible in the dashboards. Eventually impressions started coming through correctly.

Overall, this whole process taught me how sensitive ad systems are to traffic quality and request behavior — much more than I expected when I originally started building the app.

If anyone here is experimenting with:

• activity tracking
• fitness apps
• sensor fusion
• AdMob mediation
• mobile monetization

…I’d genuinely be interested in hearing about your experiences too.

And if you’d like to try the app itself and give honest feedback (especially regarding elevation tracking accuracy across different devices), here are the links:

Android:
Google Play Store

iOS:
Apple App Store