Arc Timeline - Trips & Places

Since Google Timeline got functionally difficult, this is a great replacement. Probably not a good idea anyway to let Google track your every movement anyway. This takes a bit more work to identify places, but you often had to do that with Google Maps anyway. Recommended!

I’ve been paying for this app for a few years, and now I can’t even access my data. For last few days it’s not been recording location data until today and now it shows ‘Thinking’, freezes and crashes every single time I open it. No support email to contact. No updates for almost a year.

This is abandonware with a subscription model a masterclass in extracting recurring revenue from a neglected product. Developer (Mr. Mattew Bruce Greenfield) continues charging $4.99 monthly for an app he has demonstrably stopped maintaining. The core failure is the so-called "learning engine” which never actually learns. Despite manually correcting hundreds of misidentified trips 30-minute tram commutes repeatedly logged as "walking," walking segments corrupted by phantom "cycling" recordings, the system and machine learning bogus shows zero improvement. The advertised highest accuracy detection is fiction; it cannot distinguish between a bicycle and an airplane moving at vastly different speeds, rendering all statistics meaningless. Battery consumption directly contradicts the developer's claims. The app description promises "low power sleep mode" with GPS deactivated when stationary, yet Arc routinely consumes 40-50% daily battery on an iPhone 15 Pro—effectively requiring mid-day charging for anyone with a two-hour commute. This is not the "morning to evening" performance advertised. Most egregiously, the GPX export function (the only method to retrieve your personal location data) produces corrupted files unreadable by standard mapping tools like QGIS or Google Earth. Your location history is held hostage behind a paywall for an export feature that fundamentally does not work. The support forum is a ghost town; critical bug reports receive no developer response and the developer himself hasn’t been active on his own form in almost a year. When challenged about converting a functional app into a mandatory subscription service, Mr. Greenfield's published response dismisses us: "if you're not willing to pay for this kind of functionality, yes, you will need to look elsewhere." This app’s business plan is a monthly tax on data you generated but cannot reliably access or export all while the developer requires that you give him access to all of it. The last update (January 2025) addressed trivial edge cases while core functionality deteriorates. Do not subscribe. Do not reward this developer for monetizing software he refuses to maintain. Time to sunset this and move on.