How much battery does Miles use?
Miles is built to sip battery. Heavy travel days use a little more and quiet days at home use less. If you see drain that bothers you, get in touch: that is a bug, not a feature.
Support
Help with Miles
Miles is built to be simple, but background tracking on iPhone has a few moving parts. Start here, then email if you get stuck.
Quick start
Two permissions make automatic tracking work. Grant both and you are done:
- Location, set to Always Allow. Accept the prompt when Miles asks, or set it later in iPhone Settings under Privacy & Security, Location Services, Miles. With "While Using" instead of "Always", Miles can only record trips while the app is open on screen.
- Motion & Fitness. Motion data is how Miles tells a walk from a bus ride. Accept the prompt, or enable it in iPhone Settings under Privacy & Security, Motion & Fitness.
- Then just go somewhere. Take a walk or a drive. Your first trips appear on their own, and a Live Activity shows on the Lock Screen while a trip is in progress.
If trips are not appearing, check those two permissions first, then make sure Background App Refresh is on and Low Power Mode is off.
How does trip detection work?
Miles combines location, the motion sensors and the barometer (the pressure sensor that notices climbs and descents) to detect when a journey starts and ends, then works out which of 11 transport modes it was, from walking and cycling to trains, ferries and flights. Motorbike is the one mode you tell it about, because sensors cannot reliably tell it apart from a car.
Flights are the party trick: iOS suspends a low power background tracker like Miles in the air, so it rebuilds the flight after you land, using a built-in list of 4,045 airports plus what the pressure sensor recorded. The detection and classification all run on your phone, and your trip history itself stays on the device; the short list of things that do leave, small coordinate lookups and anonymous diagnostics, is in the privacy policy.
How do I correct a trip?
Open the trip and choose the correct transport mode from the trip detail screen. Corrections take a couple of taps, keep your history accurate, and help Miles classify similar trips better in future. You can also add manual trips for journeys the app could not see.
What are Private Areas?
Private Areas add discretion around sensitive places like home or work. Draw a zone in the app, and any trip start or end point inside it is left out of CSV exports, shared trip images and the iPhone search index. Inside the app on your own device, your trips stay complete.
How do subscriptions, the free trial and cancelling work?
Voyager costs €2.99 per month or €24.99 per year (or the local equivalent), and both plans start with a 1 month free trial. Subscriptions are billed by Apple and auto renew until cancelled: go to iPhone Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions, and cancel there at least 24 hours before the current period (or the trial) ends. If you cancel during the trial in time, you pay nothing. Reinstalled or switched phones? Sign in with the same Apple ID and use Restore Purchases in the app.
How do I export or delete my data?
Export: the app's settings include a CSV export of your full trip history, free for everyone, no subscription needed. Delete: the Delete All Data action in the app's settings permanently removes everything in two taps, and deleting the app itself does the same. Raw GPS points are also pruned automatically after 7 days. Details in the privacy policy.
What happens if I lose my phone, or get a new one?
Back Up Everything, in the app's settings under Data, writes a single file holding your whole history: every trip with its route, your saved places, your Private Areas, your achievements. Keep it wherever you keep things. Restore from Backup on the new phone reads it back. Both are free on every tier, because being locked out of your own movement history is the thing we most dislike about this category.
Restoring merges rather than overwrites. Each trip is recognised individually, so restoring onto a phone that already has history adds only what is missing, and importing the same file twice changes nothing the second time.
Miles also keeps its database in a folder iOS includes in your iPhone backup, so restoring a new phone from a backup is expected to bring your history with it. We say expected deliberately: we have not yet run that end to end across two devices, and we would rather say so than imply a guarantee we have not tested. Take a backup file as well if you are changing phones. One thing we do already know: photos are linked to your photo library rather than copied into Miles, so on a new phone those links may not resolve even though the trips do.
There is still no iCloud sync in version 1.0, and it stays top of the list for what comes after. The CSV export is unchanged and stays free, but it is for spreadsheets rather than for restoring: it carries no routes, no journeys, no photo links and no achievements, and it blanks endpoints inside a Private Area.
Contact
Need help from a human?
Email: miles.support.app@gmail.com
Miles is built by one person, so replies may not be instant, but they will be real. It helps to mention your iPhone model, iOS version and what you expected to happen.