Remember my old story about getting Strava working on Huawei handsets? It involves disabling the sometimes over-zealous power management on your Huawei phone.
Why do this? Well, if you’re running Strava (the running and cycling recording app) on a Huawei phone then the battery control software will see the app running in the background and will kill it, thinking that it’s draining all your power.
I thought I’d fixed in on the Huawei P9 but, on a recent 4-hour cycle ride using the new P10, Strava closed itself three times. Each time I re-opened the app Strava it would cleverly detect that something had gone wrong and would restart the recording. Trouble is, your entire activity is then messed up. If you’re cycling it’ll restart and miss out the portion of the ride you’ve just done. The end result is a big straight line between the point at which the app closed and when you manually restarted it again…
…that straight line causes Strava to think that you’ve cycled really, really slowly and it messes up your average speed and altitude. It doesn’t remember any of the other waypoints or the fact that you cycled off to the right a bit and then up a hill. Instead it just sees that you went from point A to point E in a straight line – never mind about point B, C or D.
Head to the Strava site and there is a support page about this, but Strava themselves seem to wash their hands of it a little. There’s a mention of disabling power management and there’s a couple of comments about disabling Google Apps which, apparently, stops the GPS signal being received. That’s about it, but on the P10 (which is equipped with a newer version of the power management) none of this works. I know because I’ve tweaked and re-tweaked all the settings required and it’s failed over and over again.
No matter what I do, the app crashes / closes / stops recording.
I’m not the only one either. Sure, some people seem to have sorted the issue on other phones by keeping the screen permanently on but that’s less than ideal and uses your battery heavily. The official advice is now a little outdated, and I’m seeing the issue pop up whenever the app “auto pauses” (when you stop moving for a short period).
The comments on the Strava thread continue to pop up, and there seems to be no solid fix. I’ve told Strava that it’s a “power intensive” app but it still fails, and what makes it so frustrating is that the Huawei P10 is such a damned good phone.
Strava and Huawei need to work together on this one to properly resolve it.
I’ve also head of other phones killing Strava (and other activity trackers) due to the added-on power management software.
With this problem it means that I now have to leave the P10 at home and use something called an “iPhone”. That’s not something I should be doing. It should just work. There shouldn’t even be any per management faffage to deal with either. It should be whitelisted as default.
So come on Strava, come on Huawei. Get together on this one. Sort it out. The increased popularity of Huawei phones mean that this issue is only going to continue.
Have any of you experienced this? Do give me your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to know if the same issue appears on Honor phones too, as they’re effectively the same in many ways.
We’ve been in touch with Strava and we’ll let you know if we hear back.
Update – We’ve received a response from Huawei, but sadly the advice was to check the power and background app settings that we’d already looked at. However, Strava gave us a very interesting reply, which seems to suggest that Strava on Huawei (and Honor handsets too we’re assuming) isn’t fully supported…
We’ve asked for a bit more information on this and we’ll let you know more soon.
Update – Here’s their most recent response to us..
Update – We’ve raised a support case with Strava and we’ve given lots of examples when the Huawei P10 has closed the Strava app. We are waiting to hear back. Meanwhile, Huawei UK have sent us a slightly translated tweet confirming that their development team are looking into the problem. Let’s hope everyone can work together on this one to get it resolved. Teamwork makes the dream work 🙂
