How often does a hiking app actually record your GPS position?
It sounds like a question with a tidy numeric answer — once a second, once every five metres. Sometimes an app will even show you a number that looks like that. But your phone is not running on a fixed timer at all. Here is what actually decides when a new point lands in your track, and why it matters less than it looks like it should.
The short answer
On iPhone, location updates come from Apple's Core Location framework, and Core Location does not hand out a fixed number of updates per second. A recording app asks for continuous, high-accuracy updates, and the operating system delivers a new position whenever it has one worth reporting — which in practice is driven far more by whether you are moving than by a wall clock.
Walking steadily under open sky, that usually settles into something close to a point every second or two. Standing still at a viewpoint or a lunch stop produces far fewer new points, because there is nothing new to report until you move again — which is the correct behaviour, not a gap in the recording.
What actually decides when a new point lands
A few layers sit between "the phone has a GPS chip" and "a point appears in the track":
- The GNSS receiver itself, producing a raw position fix, typically around once a second with a clear view of the sky.
- Core Location's own filtering, which can hold back an update that is too close to the last one to be worth delivering.
- The accuracy mode the app requested — a continuous, navigation-grade mode behaves differently from a coarser, battery-friendly one.
- Whether you are actually moving. A stationary phone has nothing new to log, and deliberately does not log it, since a run of near-identical points would only add file size and noise for no benefit.
None of this is something a recording app controls point by point. It is asking the operating system for a stream of updates and taking what it is given, shaped by how you are actually moving at the time.
Why a denser track is not automatically a more accurate one
It is tempting to assume more points means more accuracy, but those are two different claims. Distance and shape come mostly from how precise each individual fix is — typically a few metres of error under open sky — not from how many fixes you have. A sparse but clean set of points draws a truer line than a dense but noisy one.
What point density really changes is how smooth a tight corner looks on paper. A switchback with only a couple of points through the tightest part of the turn can look slightly cut short or squared off on the map, simply because nothing was recorded in between to draw the curve through. That is an artefact of where the points happened to land, not a distance error worth worrying about over the length of a whole hike.
Density has a real cost of its own, too: more points make for a larger GPX file, and a track logged more aggressively asks more of the phone over a long day. That is part of why continuous background recording is built to be efficient rather than maximally dense.
Why the same walk can produce different point counts in different apps
Two apps recording the same walk side by side will not end up with identical point counts, and that is expected rather than a sign either one is broken. Each asks the operating system for updates with its own accuracy setting and applies its own filtering before deciding a point is worth keeping. A GPX track, once written, is simply the ordered list of whatever points a given app decided to hold on to — the format itself has no opinion on how many there should be.
It is the same underlying reason two apps can report slightly different distance or elevation totals for what feels like the same route: both start from GPS fixes, but each has already filtered and processed that stream differently before it ever becomes a number on a screen.
What this means for your recording
In practice, none of this is something to manage by hand. Point density is not a dial worth reaching for mid-hike — it is a background negotiation between the app and the operating system, biased towards recording while you move and easing off while you do not, and it tends to look after itself.
TrailCam records this way in the background for exactly that reason: the route keeps recording while the screen is off or you are in another app, and time spent paused stays out of it, so a lunch stop does not leave a pointless cluster of points sitting in the file. When you are done, the route exports as GPX 1.1 or CSV, point density and all, as part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade.
Questions
- Does a denser GPS track mean a more accurate distance?
- Not directly. Distance accuracy depends mainly on how precise each individual fix is, not on how many of them you have. A dense but noisy track can even overstate distance slightly, since GPS wobble on a slow or stationary point still gets counted as if you had moved.
- Can I control how often an app logs a GPS point?
- Mostly no. The interval comes out of a negotiation between the accuracy mode the app requested and what Core Location and the GPS chip actually deliver, filtered by whether you are moving. It is not usually an adjustable setting.
- Why does my track look squared-off on tight switchbacks?
- Because fewer points were recorded through the tightest part of the turn, so the line connecting them cuts the corner. It is a drawing artefact from sparse points at that one spot, not a sign the whole route is inaccurate.
Recording your own routes
TrailCam is an iPhone app that records your route with GPS, keeps video clips, photos and voice notes pinned to the spot where you took them, and exports the result as GPX 1.1 or CSV. It is free to download.