[Resolved] Global Heat Map disappears when Offline

Hey @Ale67, 
Thanks for your posts! While researching I found that our engineers are aware of the heatmap issue. They are working to resolve it as quickly as possible, although I do not currently have an estimated time for resolution.

We will update this post once we have an update. Thank you for your patience. 

Has this been resolved?  I have the paid version and can no longer see heat maps when offline. Thanks. 

Dear Bryant, last friday I went for a ride and I'm sorry to say the situation was even worse: 

not only the heatmap disappeared, but the whole map desappeared, leaving me with a black screen with a blue dot, not moving from the starting point. However the app works in background because you can see the milage and time moving. Indeed, when I finished my ride, I saved it and the tracking and stats were perfect. The problem is that if you cannot see the map this app is useless if you go on new trails.

I was thinking to go for the paid version to solve this problem but I see that there are people having the same problem with the paid version as well. 

Thank you for helping us. Alessandro

I will be cancelling my premium subscription once the free trial ends because of this bug. Offline heat maps are the only feature that make $80/yr worth it for me.

​@Ale67 and everyone else - are you still experiencing the issue? Our team has been working on the fix so we would like to verify it all looks good from your side? Thanks!

Hi ​@Lola, I got to try this last week in the mountains, and unfortunately, it is still an issue. I’m using a Pixel 9.

When you go offline (e.g. flight mode, or no signal), initially the global heatmap does persist. But as soon as the app gets unloaded (e.g. because you used other apps that need the memory) and reloaded, it’s all gone. So it’s a very fragile state that you can’t depend on.

And it’s actually quite easy to repro:

• Launch Strava, and go into Maps. You see all the heatmaps, along with the base map.
• Go into airplane mode. The heatmap still looks fine in the loaded area (obviously, if you pan to somewhere far, it’s not cached, but we don’t care).
• Kill the app
• Re-launch Strava and go into Maps

Result: you just get a white page. Both the heatmaps and base map are gone.

For this to work properly, Strava needs to cache this data more persistently, as is the case for instance in Google Maps.

As others have said, this is a massively important feature when going out in remote areas with no signal.

Thanks!

David

​@davidebbo I've tried this myself now. What device are you using? On my Pixel phone, I killed the app and turned on airplane mode. The map regions in my area loaded fine, although the heatmaps did not. I was able to see the base map in a decently wide swath. 

​@arc88 I have a Pixel 9. Not sure why the behavior is different. In fact, when I was in the mountains, I do believe that I still had the base maps and just lost the heatmaps (so like you).

Since the focus in this thread is on the heatmaps, maybe best to ignore the regular maps. For the heatmaps, we’re both seeing the same thing, and that is the core problem.

​@arc88 so interesting thing, I found that the behavior is different in these two scenarios:

1. Just using the Strava app’s Map feature
2. Starting an activity and viewing the Map from there

Above, I was testing #1, and losing everything after killing it offline. But with #2, it does appear to preserve everything (including heatmaps) after killing it. So basically, they only cache things correctly when tracking an activity.

Normally, I use my watch to track the activity, and just open Strava for the map, so I’m in the broken mode.

Can you try with #2 to see if heatmaps are also preserved for you?

I tried starting an activity and then swiping away the app. Yes, the map was still there when I reopened it but also it didn't actually close. While recording the app becomes a background service and thus stays loaded in RAM.

Considering this is tagged as a known issue, perhaps they can default offline use to last known map region instead of no result.

​@Bryant ​@Lola Could you see if this is intended behavior or if there is an update for offline heatmaps in the works? 

Thanks ​@Lola for your response. While it is not ideal, recording a throwaway activity just to get the heatmap to persist does provide a workaround, so I’ll do that in the future.

Though it does imply that you need connectivity at the start of the activity, right? This is not always the case, but at least it will work sometimes.