Recorded mileage¶
DashPilot reports the distance it actually recorded. That is a different number from the distance the driver actually drove, and the whole design of this feature is about keeping the two apart.
What the figure means¶
A shift's mileage is measured from the positions retained during it. Positions recorded without an interruption are joined and summed; wherever capture stopped, the distance across the break is left out rather than bridged with a straight line.
So the figure is a floor. The driver drove at least this far. How much further is unknown, and DashPilot does not estimate it.
A synthetic shift
A three-hour shift where recording ran for the first hour, was interrupted for forty minutes, then ran again reports the distance of the first stretch plus the distance of the last one. The driving during the forty minutes is missing from the total, and the shift is labelled a partial route.
When recording runs¶
Recording starts when a shift starts with DashPilot open, and carries on while the driver uses the delivery app, follows a route in Maps, or locks the phone. That is what most of a shift looks like, so it is the case the feature is built around.
Two halves of one rule make it work: recording can only be started with DashPilot open, and once started it continues off screen. DashPilot asks for location while in use and nothing more.
Why recording stops¶
- The shift ends. Recording stops with it.
- Location permission is lost, or Location Services is switched off for the device.
- iOS suspends or ends the app. It gives no guarantee of background execution, and DashPilot does nothing to be relaunched: no significant-location-change monitoring, no region monitoring. Recording resumes the next time the driver opens the app.
- The driver force quits DashPilot, which is the same case.
- A shift was started by voice with DashPilot behind another app. There was no recording to continue, and one cannot begin off screen, so that shift records nothing until the app is opened.
- The driver parks for a pickup. Recording stops until they record that they are driving again. See Parked for a pickup below.
The running shift says which of these is happening at the time, so a driver is not left assuming their route is being recorded when it is not, and the active line says plainly that recording is not guaranteed.
While the shift is still running¶
A running shift reports the same figure, in the same words, for the route recorded so far, with its segment and gap counts beneath it. It is the finished shift's calculation applied to the positions stored up to now, not a preview or an estimate, and it is subject to every rule on this page: it grows only while positions are being accepted, it stops the moment the driver pauses, and resuming never adds the distance covered during the break — that stretch was not recorded, so it is not measured.
One difference, and it is a consequence of the shift being unfinished. A completed shift's route is also checked against the shift's own start and end, so a route that begins long after the shift did or stops long before it ended counts that as a gap. A running shift has no such window: its end is still moving, and measuring against the moment the figure is read would count every red light as an unrecorded stretch. Gaps between recorded positions are counted exactly as they are afterwards, so a pause always shows as one and the shift reads as a partial route from then on.
The figure is read from the store every couple of seconds and extended with the positions recorded since the last reading, rather than measured from the beginning each time. Nothing about it is saved: when the shift ends, its mileage is measured from the stored route in one pass, as it always was.
Parked for a pickup¶
Walking around a shop after parking is work, and it is not driving. DashPilot cannot tell the two apart on its own: a stored position carries no speed, and the rule that keeps a route from filling up with noise treats a walk across a car park exactly as it treats a crawl through traffic. So the app does not guess. The driver says it, and DashPilot records that they said it.
There are three places to say it, and they record the same thing through the same code: the control
on the running shift, the Park my vehicle in DashPilot shortcut, and the button on the shift's Lock
Screen card. A driver carrying two bags cannot unlock a phone, and a state nobody can enter or leave
hands-free is a state that gets forgotten, which is the failure that costs the rest of the shift's
route. See Voice and system actions and
The shift on the Lock Screen.
Parking is a fact about the vehicle, not about an order: no delivery need be in progress, no number of deliveries in progress refuses it, and nothing anywhere asks or records why the driver parked.
While a shift is recorded as parked:
- Recording stops, so the walk is never written down at all. Nothing is deleted, because nothing is captured.
- The shift keeps running. Its working time keeps counting, its deliveries keep their own lifecycles, and every hourly figure it will produce keeps the denominator it had. Parking is not pausing, and nothing about it is ever subtracted from working time.
- Driving again starts a new recording, so the distance between where the vehicle was parked and where it is driven off from is not counted. That stretch was not recorded, so it is not measured.
Leaving the state is always the driver's. Resume Driving is one tap, pausing the shift leaves it,
and ending the shift closes it at the end. Nothing resumes because a speed changed, because a
position moved or because a delivery advanced: the app would be deciding the driver had walked back
to their car, and the cost of deciding that wrongly is a walk recorded as vehicle mileage.
The running shift and the Lock Screen both say Parked for as long as the state lasts, because
forgetting to leave it is the expensive way this goes wrong. The Lock Screen card shows exactly one
of the pair at a time: Park Vehicle while the shift is driving, Resume Driving while it is
parked, never both, because one of the two would always be a transition the store would refuse.
A completed shift that was parked says how many stretches it recorded and how long they came to altogether, beside the route that they explain. It does not claim that those stretches are the gaps the route reports: a shift whose recording had already stopped for some other reason produces no gap by parking, and the route keeps no record of which stop is which.
The wording of a partial route moves with it. "More miles were driven than were recorded" is the honest reading of a route DashPilot stopped by accident, and it is simply untrue of a stretch a vehicle spent in a parking space, so a shift that records a stretch parked says that part of it was not recorded and stops there.
Gaps, segments and partial routes¶
The detail screen describes a route with three facts, all of them counts of what capture did rather than claims about the drive:
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Recorded mileage | The distance summed inside continuous stretches of capture |
| Capture segments | How many unbroken stretches of capture contributed distance |
| Capture gaps | How many stretches of the shift the route does not account for |
| Partial route | The total is known to be less than the distance driven |
A gap count of zero reads as "No capture gaps detected". That is a statement about the detection, not a promise that the whole shift was recorded.
There is no coverage percentage, and there will not be one until there is a denominator. The denominator would have to be the distance actually driven, which is exactly the number DashPilot does not have. A percentage over segments and gaps would be an invention.
A shift whose route was recorded before schema v3 carries no evidence of capture continuity. Its continuity is inferred from timestamps, the detail screen says so, and such a route is always reported as partial, because its short gaps cannot be seen at all.
Correcting a shift's end re-measures it¶
Recorded mileage belongs to the shift that recorded it, so correcting a shift's end time to an earlier moment removes the positions fixed after it and measures the distance again from what remains. It is never scaled by the time removed: a shift that loses a quarter of its length loses whichever positions were in that quarter, which may be all of its route or none of it. Nothing is interpolated to the corrected end, so the stretch between the last retained position and the new boundary is a capture gap like any other. Correcting an end later adds no position and no mile, and the shift reports the stretch it did not record as a gap. See Correcting a shift's end time.
What is derived from it¶
Recorded mileage is the denominator of the shift's per-recorded-mile rate, part of every period's mileage total, and, on a completed shift that records a fuel economy and a gas price, the basis of an estimated fuel cost. Because it is a floor rather than a total, that estimate is a floor too: more miles were driven than were recorded, so more fuel was used than is estimated. The screen says so wherever the route is partial. See Estimated fuel and net.
When there is nothing to report¶
A route with nothing measurable in it says so rather than showing 0.0 mi, which a driver would
read as "you did not move" rather than "no distance could be measured". Two kinds of nothing are
distinguished: no usable position was recorded at all, or positions exist but no two of them were
captured continuously.
What it is not¶
- Not a tax or deduction figure. DashPilot is not a tax tool, and a mileage deduction needs a complete log, which capture that iOS can interrupt cannot produce. An estimated fuel cost derived from it is not one either.
- Not per-delivery mileage. Deliveries are not recorded yet, so no distance is attributed to one.
- Not calibrated. The thresholds behind capture and measurement are defensible engineering choices for driving with a phone in a vehicle, not values tuned against recorded driving.
- Not a live odometer. The running figure advances in tenths of a mile as the store is read, and it is what was recorded rather than what was driven, exactly as the finished figure is.
The rules behind the numbers are documented under Route measurement.