Dynamic compass is terrible

It occurred to me that I've been living with - since the dawn of Prime - one real problem. I asked in my local community and everyone else had their excuses why this feature wasn't working, or they turned it off with prime, so we had a collective amnesia.

I'm talking about dynamic compass.

In most mapping-based apps, if you're moving, the "up" side of the phone is your direction of travel.

This is (correctly) implemented because the "cursor" (your self) being below the centerline, so you can see further in the direction you're travelling toward.

Google maps does a great job. Even off of roads. Even while walking. Even at bicycle speeds. Even with all kinds of jitter.

Niantic's dynamic compass is almost always wrong, it almost always has the direction I'm travelling pointing DOWN, the direction you can't see as much of, as if the code has simply flipped the bit. It's also noisy and gets the direction wrong sometimes, but that's to be expected (I mean, you don't have the resources of Google) sometimes.

The fact that it's dead wrong MOST of the time could be fixed, no?

Maybe they're even trying to do "up is north" which is really not helpful, then add a "motion is up" feature, which is what everyone wants anyway?

A great creature comfort?

Thanks for listening.

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  • @bbulkow I haven't seen this on my iPhone 8. To help me repro, can you share what device and what OS version number you're on?

    If you haven't already tried this, something that might help with compass calibration on your device is if you flip your device over several times, and also try the figure 8 loop as demonstrated here:


  • 33ond8833ond88 ✭✭
    edited October 2021

    I had the same issue.

    Go to:

    Settings

    Privacy

    Location services

    Scroll all the way down to:

    System services

    Make sure these are on:

    Compass calibration

    Motion Calibration

    Then go to Compass settings:

    Turn off “True north”

    Go to Ingress app:

    Turn on “Dynamic Compass”

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