Whereyougo distance problem

[+The Old Bears]

New to WhereYouGo.  I use an android phone and a friend uses an iPhone.  When we approach GZ for each stage the iPhone immediately finds the GZ but I have to walk usually 50 or more feet from GZ before my Android finds the GZ.  Am I missing a setting, or something else?  Help much appreciated.  Thanks.

[+Tungstène]

Which kind of Wherigo cartridge was it? 

 

I definitely think there is a problem with whereyougo regarding distance calculation. I see this with some play anywhere cartridges (depending on the way it was coded). 

[Ranger Fox]

It could be the way the player apps handle zone shapes.  The easiest thing to do is to tell you how far you are from the center of the zone or one of the coordinates in its bounding box.  It's harder to tell you how far away you are from any point on the side of a contorted shape.  For example, if the zone is shaped like Pac-Man and you walk into the shape's mouth, how far are you from the zone?  Just how does one efficiently calculate the player's distance to any point in the shape?  Now, imagine you have three or four of these shapes.  The phone updates the GPS position once a second, so the calculations shouldn't take longer than that, not to mention all the calculations needed to check for events such as entering, proximity, and so on.  So I can understand why everyone who creates an app could have a different idea of how to get a player's distance to a zone.

 

Other than that, if each phone has an accuracy of twenty-five feet or so, it's possible for them to be fifty feet off at times.  Or perhaps the phone is feeding the app a less detailed GPS position because it can't get finer detail.  There can be many contributing factors.  Geocaching is easier because you're always navigating to a point and you don't have to process any other events.