When it does not do what you expected

• What it is not
• Downloading a sector
• No GPS fix at altitude
• Subscriptions, and what stays yours
• Place names and languages
• A photograph of yours
• The watch and the iPad
• Which build you have
• Privacy requests
• Writing in

What it is not

Three limits worth knowing before you conclude something is broken. Airspace boundaries approximate published airspace — good enough for “we enter the Milan FIR in about five minutes”, and not good enough for anything operational. Places are held as single points, so a distance to a mountain range, a sea or a city is approximate by construction. And the data goes stale: a map built last year describes last year. The terms say this at more length.

Downloading a sector

Why it has to happen on the ground

The world map and all 7,764 places are installed with the app, and they are coarse on purpose — enough to see where you are anywhere on earth, and a long way short of naming the valley. A sector is the detailed band along the great circle between two airports, and it is assembled from three public services at the moment you ask for it: map tiles from the Protomaps planet build, elevation data for the shaded relief, and full-size photographs from Wikimedia Commons. All of that comes over the network, which is why the app tells you to do it before you fly. The size is shown before you commit to it.

Nothing stops you tapping download in the air. The app does not lock the button, because it cannot know whether the aircraft has usable wi-fi. What it does is fail cleanly: with nothing reachable it stops immediately and says “No Protomaps build reachable. Check the connection.”

A download that stopped

A half-finished sector is deleted rather than kept. This is deliberate: a partial archive renders as a map with holes in it and no indication that anything is missing, which is a worse outcome than no sector at all. If you cancel, the app says “Download cancelled. Nothing was kept.” Start it again on a better connection; nothing is resumed and nothing is left behind.

Photographs are fetched last and are allowed to fail on their own. A sector that arrives without its pictures is still a working sector, and the smaller copies bundled with the app are still there.

Flying outside the corridor

If you divert, or fly a stretch you did not download, the map does not go blank. It falls back to the bundled world map and the smaller pictures already on the phone. You lose the detail, not the app.

Sectors taking up space

A sector flown last month is dead weight. The route screen has a housekeeping setting that deletes installed sectors after a number of days you choose, and a button to run the cleanup immediately. Set it to zero and sectors are kept indefinitely.

No GPS fix at altitude

This is the commonest thing people write in about, and it is not a fault. A GNSS antenna inside an aluminium tube loses the sky for minutes at a time, and a phone in a seat pocket or against a bulkhead may never get it back. The app's rule here is the same as everywhere else: say what it knows, and do not print what it does not.

So the readout shows em dashes rather than zeros when there is no fix, because “0 ft, 0 kt, 000°” is three confident claims made by an app that has just said it does not know where it is. The aircraft symbol turns grey when the position is estimated rather than observed, with a ring showing roughly how wrong it might be.

What the status line means, and what to do about it. It is tappable in every case where there is something to do.

What it says	What is happening
“Waiting for location permission.”	iOS has not asked yet. It will.
“Location access is off. Enable it in Settings to use GPS.”	Permission was declined. Tapping opens iOS Settings. Everything else in the app still works — the map, the catalogue, the sector downloads and the crossings — it just cannot tell you what is out of the window until you tell it where you are.
“Waiting for a GPS fix. Inside an aircraft this can take several minutes — or never.”	The normal case at altitude. Tap the readout to set the position by hand.
“The last position is more than half an hour old.”	There is an old fix, and it is too old to fly on. Same remedy.
“No satellite fix for n min. Estimated position, good to about n km.”	Dead reckoning from the last fix. Still useful, and it tells you how much to trust it.
“The app was in the background, so the estimate was dropped.”	iOS suspended the app and the dead-reckoned estimate is no longer safe to carry forward. It starts again.

Setting the position by hand

Tap the readout at the top of the map. Four ways in, offered in the order of how right they are likely to be:

The “Set position” sheet. You can also enter track, ground speed and flight level from the instruments, which the app otherwise has to infer.

Coordinates	Present position from the FMS. The most accurate, and what a crew will use.
Waypoint	Overhead a navaid or an airport.
Point on the map	Drag the aircraft to where you are.
A place below	Pick somewhere you can see directly beneath you.

Even a perfect reading is a kilometre or two stale by the time it is typed, because the aircraft covers a quarter of a kilometre a second, and the app accounts for that. A satellite always wins: the moment a real fix arrives it replaces whatever you entered, without asking.

Subscriptions, and what stays yours

The build currently distributed has no purchases in it and no subscription. Nothing in it can charge you anything. A subscription is written and intended for a later build; it will cover downloading sectors beyond the first one, and the bundled world, the places, the photographs, the live position, the feed, the crossings and the six languages are not behind it and are not going to be.

A sector you have already downloaded keeps working whether or not a subscription is still running. A lapsed subscription stops new downloads and nothing else. Taking back bytes somebody has paid for, mid trip, is not something this app will do — and it is precisely the case most likely to arise, because renewals fail while the phone is in aeroplane mode. If Apple is retrying a failed renewal, that counts as subscribed for as long as the retry lasts.

Prices, receipts, cancellations and refunds are handled by the App Store rather than by us, and are managed in the Subscriptions section of your Apple account. No price is quoted on this website, because none has been set with Apple yet. Terms, section 7 says the same thing in the language of terms.

Place names and languages

Groundtrack reads announcements in six languages — English, French, Polish, German, Spanish, Italian — and picks whichever of those your phone is set to, or English. Nothing is machine translated. Place names come from Wikidata's own labels and descriptions come from that language's own Wikipedia, which means the coverage is uneven and the app is honest about it rather than filling the gaps with a translation engine.

So three things that look like bugs are not:

• An English name in the middle of a French sentence. Wikidata has no French label for that place, so the English name is used rather than inventing one.
• A place with no description at all. That language's Wikipedia has no article for it. The announcement simply says less. A missing sentence is a better outcome than a wrong one read to a cabin.
• A sentence that reads a little terse. Some names carry their own article in the source label — le mont Blanc — and some do not. The app does not decline place names, because a grammar engine guessing at gender and case across six languages would produce confident nonsense.

The language is in Settings → Language, and the same explanation is under the picker there.

A photograph of yours

Groundtrack bundles 714 photographs from Wikimedia Commons, each used under its own open licence, each credited on its own card with a link to the licence and to the source file, and none of them cropped, recoloured or otherwise altered.

If one of them is yours and something about it is wrong — the credit, the licence, the attribution, or the fact that it is there at all — write to contact@flapps.cloud and it will be corrected or removed. That is the same sentence the app shows under Settings → Sources and credits, and it is meant literally. Please include the file name on Commons, or a link to it, so the right picture is found.

A correction reaches people in the next build, because the photographs are bundled with the app rather than fetched from a server we control.

The watch and the iPad

The Apple Watch app has no map. watchOS cannot run the map engine, and a worse version of the good part is not worth shipping — so what is on the wrist is the answer in words. It never asks the phone for anything; the phone leaves an answer for it to collect when it next wakes.

What the watch says when it has nothing to show. They are four different claims, not four ways of saying the same thing.

“No word from your phone yet. Open Groundtrack there and this fills in.”	The two have not spoken at all.
“Out of touch with your phone. Wake it to catch up.”	Nothing has arrived for three minutes. At 470 knots a three-minute-old answer is twenty-three miles wrong, so it is withheld rather than shown.
“Waiting for a position.”	The phone is there and does not know where it is yet. See above.
“Nothing in range.”	The phone knows exactly where it is, and there is genuinely nothing worth naming.

On iPad the feed becomes a panel down the side at full width, and goes back to being a sheet in a narrow split view. Both of these are written and tested and neither is in the build you can install today — see below.

Which build you have

Groundtrack is in testing and is not on the App Store. The TestFlight build on offer is build 5, uploaded 16 September, and it is the iPhone app. The iPad layout and the watch app arrive in the next build. A TestFlight build stops working ninety days after it is uploaded, and there will be another one; if yours has expired, that is what has happened, and the TestFlight app will offer you the current one.

It needs iOS 17 or later, and about 186 MB installed before any sector downloads. What is new in each build is listed inside the app.

Privacy requests

Your position is read on the device and never leaves it, so there is no location data anywhere for anyone to hand over, correct or delete. The privacy policy sets out what the app does count, what Google receives with it, and the honest limit on a data request when nothing collected is linked to you. Deleting the app stops all of it immediately.

Writing in

Everything goes to contact@flapps.cloud — faults, questions, a place that is wrong, a photograph to take down, or anything about the policy or the terms.

What helps, if you are reporting something that went wrong: the build number from Settings, the device and iOS version, what you expected and what happened instead, and — if it is about a particular place or sector — which one. A screenshot is worth more than a description of a screen.

Have a good flight.