My Tracks was a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking application that ran on Android. The application used a device's GPS capabilities to collect data, allowing real-time review of path, speed, distance, and elevation. Later, this data could be saved to Google Maps, Google Fusion Tables, or Google Docs and shared with Google+, Facebook, or Twitter. The application also allowed a user to record annotations along the path, hear periodic voice announcements of progress, and sync with select third-party bio-metric sensors.
In 2016, Google announced that My Tracks would be deprecated and no longer available in the Google Play Store.[2][4] An in-app popup alerted users that My Tracks would stop working on April 30, 2016;[5]
History
The application made its debut on February 12, 2009 under a closed license.[1] A year later on March 28, 2010, Google announced the open-sourcing of the application, stating that "The collective intelligence of the development community will create a more powerful, more intuitive, more useful, and more robust My Tracks."[6] The first major re-haul of the application came on July 13, 2012 when Google released version 2.0. This introduced a new interface, support for playing back data in Google Earth for Android, improved charts, and additional statistics.[7] In 2014 the developers announced on the google code project site that My Tracks would no longer developed in the open and that the source code would be removed.[8] The last open source version was 2.0.5 released in August 2013.[9]
Reception
In September 2013, the Google Play Store listed the application as being installed on 10,000,000 – 50,000,000 devices, with an overall rating of 4.4/5 from over 80,000 reviews.[2]CNET gave the application 4/5 stars, praising its "Chart, Statistics, and satellite playback" and ability to pause recordings but criticized it for an "unattractive interface" and lack of "athletic-specific features".[10] PCWorld awarded MyTracks 5/5 stars, stating "this app is just about perfect. It is intuitive to use and very stable."[11]
Forks
OpenTracks is an open-source fork launched in 2019.[12]