Ski Tracking Apps and Stats

[Andy_ROC]

Hi all--- I'm new here effective today. Anyway for years I was a Trace Snow user (formerly Alpine Replay) and was sad to see the app go away so abruptly and without warning. At least I didn't buy one of their expensive GPS trackers to stick on my skis.

Anyway I've been looking at apps to replace it. There are many but the one thing that is sorely missing with all of them is a Leaderboard like Trace Snow had. I'd see when friends went skiing and it was fun to track the global vertical leaders and filter by mountain etc. For instance someone named "Liz" had 5.6M feet of Vert last year at Aspen. Crazy! My own mountain, Bristol, had one guy that was 2nd with 4.3M vert, all done at Bristol...insane. Is it just me or did you Trace users like the leaderboard as well? Sad that it's gone.

Anyway, this year I'm playing around with 2-3 different ski/boarding specific tracking apps on my phone (android). Ski Tracks, Slopes and We Ski and Snowboard. They all are decent, have pros/cons and support both android and iPhone which is important. They all seem to work well and not kill my battery. Slopes is new to android and still has a few bugs but the UI is nice. We Ski is pretty good as well and not only shows a map and run stats like the others, but gives you a list of each lift you rode and the time each lift ride takes. The other feature on We Ski (which I haven't tried yet) is you can add "Friends" and track them in real time to find them on the mountain if you want. Ski Tracks is kind of dated but honestly it's quite solid and works well. But as I said, all lack a public leaderboard.

Also as a backup I'm running my Fenix 6 Pro linked to Strava, but Garmin/Strava ski stats aren't nearly as rich as the dedicated apps, but at least I know Garmin and/or Strava will be around for years.

Thought I'd share this info and see what others think.
Andy

 

[D.B. Cooper]

I use the Fenix 3. The main driver was to see how fast I could go. Top speed thus far is 67 mph. I don't use any phone apps.

I like the multi-use of the Fenix. Use it for golf; includes a scorecard, paddling, etc. I don't know how much I would use the fancier graphics.

The trackback on the Fenix doesn't seem to work too well, or probably user error. Tried it a few times hiking.

 

[da-bum]

Hi all--- I'm new here effective today. Anyway for years I was a Trace Snow user (formerly Alpine Replay) and was sad to see the app go away so abruptly and without warning. At least I didn't buy one of their expensive GPS trackers to stick on my skis.

Anyway I've been looking at apps to replace it. There are many but the one thing that is sorely missing with all of them is a Leaderboard like Trace Snow had. I'd see when friends went skiing and it was fun to track the global vertical leaders and filter by mountain etc. For instance someone named "Liz" had 5.6M feet of Vert last year at Aspen. Crazy! My own mountain, Bristol, had one guy that was 2nd with 4.3M vert, all done at Bristol...insane. Is it just me or did you Trace users like the leaderboard as well? Sad that it's gone.

Anyway, this year I'm playing around with 2-3 different ski/boarding specific tracking apps on my phone (android). Ski Tracks, Slopes and We Ski and Snowboard. They all are decent, have pros/cons and support both android and iPhone which is important. They all seem to work well and not kill my battery. Slopes is new to android and still has a few bugs but the UI is nice. We Ski is pretty good as well and not only shows a map and run stats like the others, but gives you a list of each lift you rode and the time each lift ride takes. The other feature on We Ski (which I haven't tried yet) is you can add "Friends" and track them in real time to find them on the mountain if you want. Ski Tracks is kind of dated but honestly it's quite solid and works well. But as I said, all lack a public leaderboard.

Also as a backup I'm running my Fenix 6 Pro linked to Strava, but Garmin/Strava ski stats aren't nearly as rich as the dedicated apps, but at least I know Garmin and/or Strava will be around for years.

Thought I'd share this info and see what others think.
Andy

I use to view that leaderboard in Trace for my local mountain Hunter. Ski Tracker supposedly has a learderboard, utilizing Google Play Games Leaderboard. I didn't opt in that feature, and besides, its stats were wildly off.

I tried Ski Tracks, Ski Tracker, fitbit watch and Strava all at the same time. Strava is somewhat off on the number of runs. Fitbit smooths out the speed too much. Ski Tracker is so off in terms of vertical feet and runs that its unusable, plus the data is completely local to the phone, for better or worse, plus they make you watch an ad every time you want to go see you stats. Ski Tracks is the most useful, but looks like a DOS program. It supposedly backs up your data, but I never checked if it works. Whe someone showed me that they were using Ski Tracks, I laughed at what they were using with that dot matrix monochrome looking interface, but now I am using it.

What Trace had was a error correction function once the data was loaded into their cloud. I had some days where it says my max speed was 80+mph, and once uploaded, it either smoothed out those wayward points or dropped it completely and my max speed dropped somewhat. Plus, you can log in via browser to see a much more comprehensive set of stats.

 

[lukoson]

review of different ski tracking apps

Find Out If You're As Fast As You Think You Are With These 5 Ski-Tracking Apps

When you need to know every bit of data, from vertical feet to how many times you hot-lapped the T-bar, these are apps are for you.

www.skimag.com

 

[Andy_ROC]

Just wanted to provide an update on this one--- I've continued using the We Ski and snowboard app in parallel with Ski Tracks app on my Samsung phone, along with the native ski app on my Garmin Fenix to Strava. I tried the Slopes app for a bit but didn't care for it and was less accurate. I can say I really like the We Ski app the best. I also know it also works well on the iPhone and Android.

The We Ski interface is clean and modern, provides run stats and highlights each run you toggle to on a map. It gives all the usual stats for each run; max speed, avg speed, vert etc. It also gives individual lift stats, like how long each chair ride takes, the vertical and distance as well--- which I found kind of interesting. One other interesting feature is that you can track your "friends" when you are at the same mountain. You can see where they are on a map making it easier to catch up with them. The other thing is the app is very gentle on my phone battery.

I've been in touch with the developer via email and he's an avid skier in Steamboat. He is very responsive and he quickly fixed one bug I found. He's also been very receptive to ideas and he plans to roll out lift wait times and eventually a leaderboard. I asked him how he plans to fund the app and he said he'd eventually develop some kind of "Freemium" model, where you can get the current features for free and then fee for enhanced features.

While I found all the ski specific phone apps to provide better stats than those native in my Garmin/Strava, I continue to track on my Garmin as well. Who knows how long specific apps will be around, but I don't think Garmin or Strava will be going away anytime soon.

So if you've been looking for a Trace replacement, We Ski and Snowboard is looking really good to me.
Hope this helps.

 

[lukoson]

Nice. I’ve been using slopes but downloaded weski for tomorrow.

 

[da-bum]

The number of We ski & snowboard downloads are in the hundreds, so I doubt the lift line wait time would be accurate. Also, it require you to sign in via a goog1e or facecrook acct, definite red flag.

No app seem to have the distance and heights of jumps that Trace Snow had. Not sure how accurate it was, saying some of my unintentinal jumps are loooong, but it was fun to see them, and definitely made me take off on more on some high speed jumps.

 

[Andy_ROC]

Lukson, great. I'll be curious to see what you think.

Da-Bum the jumping thing on Trace was wonky. It would tell me a I had a bunch of jumps and airtime but I don't let my skis leave the ground.

Yes the user community for We Ski is small yet but it's grown a lot from when I first downloaded it. As long as it grows those features become relevant.

The whole ski tracking community is all fragmented since Trace Snow shutdown without warning. I even reached out to them including their head of marketing to see if they would sell it and I got no response. I'm not sure how they couldn't figure out how to monetize a user community that was >40K strong.

Currently I think the one of the most popular in the US is Ski Tracks but has a very dated DOS looking UI and run by run and lift stats are weak. Plus no user community. The one that has the most downloads is Ski Tracker by EXA and purports to have a leaderboard but I didn't see users in our region nor many in the US. Maybe I didn't give it a chance? Do you have experience using it?

As for the login on We Ski, I guess it doesn't bother me. It is supposed to be a social app. I use my SSO through google all the time. I'm not on facebook so I have no concern with that.

Keep us updated on anything you find. I'm not married to any particular app other than also tracking on my Fenix 6 pro.

 

[da-bum]

Andy_ROC, I think Trace thinks any time you are in free-fall, you are in a middle of a jump. Not sure how accurate it is, since I remember it saying I have jumps close to 100', and at 50mph, 100' is over 1.5sec, which I don't think I have ever been close to that. I can't even login to the app to check out the history, and the website's history doesn't have any jump stats. What I did like was its correction from correction of deviant data. Those 80mph spurts that appears during recording of a session disappears once it has been uploaded to its site. I also liked its heat map of the runs overlaid over the trails (on the app only), allowing a visual view of where one is fastest, etc, as opposed to a speed graph vs time that most other apps displays.

I use Ski Tracks as the primary because it is the most accurate, but its interface is arcane, can't swipe from one run to another, making viewing or comparing between runs cumbersome or impossible.

Ski Tracker is really inaccurate, giving me a insane number of runs and total vertical. It also logs every 3 seconds vs 1 second for most of the other apps. I run it just so I have a record of that day in that app, but I rarely view its history because its data is useless, and it wants me to watch an ad, which never shows up and waits forever when I use a phone based vpn. It also seems to use the most battery, based on last week when I was running Ski Tracks, Ski Tracker, Strava and ,my Fitbit watch, which was connected to my phone and getting its GPS info from there.

 

[Johnny V.]

My own mountain, Bristol, had one guy that was 2nd with 4.3M vert, all done at Bristol...insane.

That's Charlie Dickerson. He skis for about 6-6 1/2 hours (according to him any more than that and it's like work!) per day at Bristol and either eats his lunch on the chair or the yurt at the top. Just another Bristol character!