Battery use, measured - not promised
Every mileage tracker says it's "battery friendly." None of them show you a number. GigOdo does: a Battery panel in Settings reports what the tracker actually did today - minutes of GPS, hours of low-power watching, time asleep - and your phone's measured battery use per hour while tracking. This page explains exactly how that works, because we think you should be able to check the claim.
Three power modes, and when each one runs
Auto-detect only earns its keep if it can run all day. GigOdo does that by never using more location power than the moment requires:
| Mode | When | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Recording | You're on a trip - auto-detected or started by hand | Full GPS, one fix per second. This is the only time the GPS chip works hard, and it's exactly when you want precision - these are deductible miles. |
| Watching | Between drives, auto-detect on | A coarse network-location check about every 25 seconds, plus free rides on fixes other apps already requested. No GPS chip use at all. |
| Deep sleep | Parked inside your Home Zone for 3+ minutes | Location polling stops entirely. Your phone's hardware motion sensor stands guard, with a single low-power check-in about every 5 minutes. Near-zero drain - overnight costs almost nothing. |
Waking is automatic: the motion sensor fires when the phone starts moving, or a check-in fix lands outside your Home Zone, or you hit driving speed. You never manage any of this - the notification just changes from "At home - resting, wakes on motion" to tracking.
The power ledger: what GigOdo did today
The Battery panel keeps a running ledger, reset each midnight, of how long the tracking service spent in each mode - so a typical driving day reads something like:
That's the whole story of what the tracker asked your phone to do. If the GPS number roughly matches your time behind the wheel and the rest of the day is watching and sleep, the tracker is behaving. If something looks off, you'll see it here first - not on your battery graph at 9pm.
Measured drain, honestly framed
Android doesn't let apps read the per-app battery percentages you see in system settings - that breakdown is restricted to the OS itself. So instead of estimating (or inventing) a flattering number, GigOdo measures what it can prove: it samples your battery's charge counter about once a minute while tracking and reports the phone's drain rate as ~%/hr, using only time when the phone was unplugged - most drivers run a car charger, and charging time would poison the math.
That number is the whole device - screen, every app, GigOdo included - which makes it an upper bound on GigOdo's share, not a cherry-picked slice. It appears after about 20 minutes of unplugged tracking, and it's measured on your phone, in your conditions, not a lab.
The real battery problem isn't drain - it's Android killing your tracker
Ask drivers who've abandoned a mileage tracker and you'll hear the same story: it didn't eat the battery, it just silently stopped, and a week of deductible miles vanished. Android's battery optimization is usually the culprit - it freezes background apps it considers unimportant, and a mileage tracker mid-shift looks exactly like an unimportant background app.
GigOdo watches for this. If battery optimization is enabled for the app, or Android has demoted it to a rarely-used standby bucket that delays background work, you get a warning in the Battery panel - and a card on the Home screen when auto-detect is on - with a one-tap route to the exact settings screen that fixes it. At the current IRS rate of 76 cents per mile (72.5 cents before July 2026), a single lost 200-mile week is $152 of deduction; the warning exists because that's the expensive failure, not the drain.
Getting the most from it
- Set a Home Zone (Settings, free). It's what unlocks deep sleep - without it, GigOdo stays in low-power watching whenever auto-detect is on.
- Answer yes to "Unrestricted battery" when the app asks. It's the difference between a tracker that survives an 8-hour shift and one that doesn't.
- Older phone without a motion sensor? GigOdo notices and checks in every 2 minutes instead of 5 while asleep - still a fraction of normal watching.
- Check the panel after your first full day. Settings > Battery. If the numbers don't look like your day, tell us at support@gigodo.app.
See your own number
Free forever. No trip cap, no card. Your routes never leave your phone.
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