Support and Frequently Asked Questions
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General FAQs
What is Wayward?
Wayward is the easiest adventure tracking app. Wayward makes it easy to track and share your trip, whether you’re into hiking, sailing, fishing, motorcycles, or horses.
Who is Wayward for?
For individuals, it’s a great way to track your trip and share it with your friends in real-time.
For organizers, it’s a really powerful tool for creating one-of-a-kind experiences for your participants, sponsors, and spectators.
How do I setup an event?
There are 5 easy steps:
How do I join an event?
There are 3 easy steps:
Troubleshooting
App isn’t tracking / Stuck on Loading Screen
Wayward Requires your location services to be set to ‘Always On’. If the app isn’t tracking, first go into your location services to make sure this setting is appropriately selected.
iOS Location Settings
Android Location Settings
Once that’s complete, go into the Wayward mobile app and start a new trip! To confirm you are tracking, the compass in the lower right should be gold.
Mobile app features
Spectator Map (Trip Sharing):
A key feature of Wayward is the ability to share your trip so people can follow along. This is done through a webpage we call the ‘Spectator Map'.
From your active trip screen, tap the ‘Share’ icon in the upper right to obtain the url of the unique spectator map for your trip. Then, simply share it with your fans.
Posts:
A post is a little pin that you drop to remember a thing or make a note of. It’s pretty versatile really and these are visible to your spectators. You can attach some text to it to remember your favorite campsite or to share a joke with your spectators.
Private trip:
By default, a map of your adventure will be displayed on the Wayward website for people to follow along! There are a lot of armchair adventurers that are living vicariously through you.
If you select ‘private trip’ when setting up your trip, the map will only be visible to the people that you shared the link with. The general public will be in the dark.
Does it work offline?
You betcha. The best adventures go offline. When you move through an area with no reception, the Wayward app stores your location data locally.
Once you’ve found reception again, it will sync with the server. Just give it a few seconds.
Tracking and Battery life
We’re a bit obsessive about battery life around here and its relationship with tracking accuracy. Wayward has two built-in settings that can be accessed in the ‘Settings’ screen on the mobile app.
Standard Tracking
The “standard tracking” setting is the DEFAULT on Wayward. This gives you precise tracking and results in normal battery usage.
This works great when you have the ability to charge your phone on a daily basis.
Airplane mode
One favorite hack is to put your phone in “airplane mode” to conserve battery. This gives you moderate precision and uses the least battery. This essentially turns your phone into a tracking device + camera which (let’s be honest) is really all you need on a good adventure.
To use this, follow these steps:
First, start your trip on Wayward while you have an internet connection.
Put your phone into airplane mode. Wayward will store your location data locally. The spectator map will not update during this time.
Take your phone off of airplane mode. Once you have an internet connection, your location data will upload to the spectator map. This sync may take a minute or two.
Efficiency mode.
The “efficiency tracking” setting gives you less precise data points and logs your location less often. The benefit is dramatically less battery usage.
This works great on long-distance trips or events where precision doesn’t matter as much. We’d recommend this for long backpacking trips, bike touring, and round-the-world trips.
Screen usage
Regardless of the accuracy setting, you are using, one of the biggest culprits of battery usage is spending too much time on the active tracking map itself. The less often you look at the map, the better battery performance you’ll see. Open Wayward, start tracking and then don’t look at it for a while ;).
The best way to do this is to just keep it open in the foreground (not closed, but doesn’t have to be the active app you’re “using”) and let it run.
More questions?
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