samplez/rippr-src/docs/v3/BACKLOG.md

v3 backlog

Everything known-outstanding as of v2.0.1, with enough context to pick up cold. Nothing here is committed to — it is a menu, roughly ordered by value.

Before planning anything: run the real-ride checklist in ../TESTING.md. Several items below may turn out to be non-issues, and others may appear that nobody has thought of.

---

1. Carried over from v2 — the honest debt

Elevation gain accuracy · needs real data first

~30 m of phantom gain per ten stationary minutes against synthetic ±8 m uniform noise. Real GPS altitude error is correlated rather than uniform, so the true behaviour is unknown.

The current implementation is a 15-sample moving average plus reversal hysteresis (see ../ARCHITECTURE.md). A naive version reported 1498 m over a parked bike, so the guard rails matter.

Do not tune this blind. Record a flat ride, check whether the reported gain is plausible, and only then adjust. If it needs work, options are a longer smoothing window, a larger threshold, or using barometric pressure where available (much more accurate than GPS altitude, and most phones have the sensor).

Compose UI tests · the largest coverage gap

Zero UI tests across six screens. Everything was verified by manual screenshot. Worth covering: navigation record→trips→detail→back, rotation/state retention, empty states, NotFound, chart degradation below two points, selection mode enabling Merge only at two.

Unmeasured, and probably should be

• Battery drain over a multi-hour ride — never measured, and it is the thing most likely to make the app unusable in practice
• Map memory across repeated navigation — the osmdroid lifecycle is a known hazard and the wiring was never leak-tested
• GPX import into Strava/Garmin — validated against an XML parser, but schema validity does not guarantee a consumer accepts it

---

2. The original v3 candidate — live group ride view

Deferred from v2 as "needs real server work". This was in the v1 brief's goal statement, so it has been the intended destination all along.

Already in place:

• TelemetryUploader — batched POST, retry, offline-safe, cannot stall recording
• synced column and backlog semantics
• trip_id / segment_id per point, so a server can reconstruct rides and pauses
• Config.deviceId — stable per-install id to distinguish riders

Missing:

• A server. Nothing exists. This is the actual work.
• UI for the endpoint — currently only reachable via Config.setUploadEndpoint()
• Other riders' positions on a map, and a live map at all (see below)
• Auth, rider identity, group membership

Worth deciding early: this is the point where Rippr stops being a local-only app. That brings hosting, privacy, and location-sharing consent into scope.

---

3. Live map on the recording screen — decision reversed

v2 deliberately shipped no live map, on the reasoning that the phone rides in a pocket. Dylan has since asked for one anyway, for visual appeal. Treat the v2 stance as superseded.

What still holds and should not be given up:

• TrackingService must never reference a map. Rendering belongs to the Compose lifecycle of a visible screen, not the service.
• Screen-on only. No tile fetch or redraw while backgrounded.
• Battery cost sits on top of GPS and a wake lock — worth measuring before and after.

---

4. Smaller items

Item	Notes
Trip splitting	Merge exists; split does not. The natural counterpart.
SAF export	Dropped in T16 as unnecessary — share sheet covers it. Add if a real need appears.
Auto-pause	Detect a stop and pause automatically. Rejected in v2 as unreliable in traffic; revisit only with real ride data showing it would help.
Distance units	Metric only, hardcoded. Trivial to add a preference.
Settings screen	None exists. Config has endpoint, deviceId, mapEnabled — the map toggle currently lives on trip detail because one switch did not justify a screen.
Offline tile pre-download	osmdroid caches what it renders; a mountain ride with no signal shows blank tiles. Respect OSM's usage policy — no bulk prefetch of their public servers.
Notification live stats	Show distance/duration in the ongoing notification, readable without unlocking.
Crash reporting	None. A recorder that dies mid-ride currently leaves no trace beyond logcat.

---

5. Ideas

Terse on purpose. Unshaped, to be consolidated later.

• Live map while recording. More visually appealing than a numbers screen. Reverses the v2 decision — see section 3 for the constraints that survive it.
• Pick a real theme. The current look is functional dark + safety orange, chosen to match the icon. Decide on an actual visual identity and push the UI toward something polished rather than merely clean.
• User sign-up and accounts. Register people, give their data somewhere to live. Prerequisite for anything cloud-side, and pairs with the group-ride server in section 2.
• Activity type per ride. Motorcycle, bicycle, skateboard, running, other. The app is not inherently motorcycle-only — the recording pipeline is activity-agnostic already. Note: adds a column to Trip, so it needs a real Migration (the destructive fallback is gone). Type could also drive sensible defaults — speed noise floor, map zoom, elevation smoothing.
• Paid cloud backup. Ongoing storage of rides over time. Needs accounts first, plus a decision on hosting, pricing, and what happens to data when someone stops paying.

Threads running through these

Sign-up, cloud backup and group ride are one programme, not three: they all need a server, identity, and a privacy stance. Worth scoping together rather than separately.

Activity type and theming are independent and much cheaper — either could ship alone.

---

6. Things that must not regress

Hard-won and easy to undo by accident. Each has a comment in the code explaining why.

1. The unbounded Channel + single batched writer. Do not write to the database from the location callback.
2. Points stamped with tripId/segmentId at creation. Refactoring this into a write-time lookup breaks the pause guarantee silently.
3. Recording state derived from the database. Never reintroduce an in-memory flag.
4. fallbackToDestructiveMigration() stays removed. Any schema change ships a Migration against app/schemas/com.rippr.data.AppDatabase/2.json.
5. Decimation is render-only. It must never reach storage or export.
6. RipprTheme's Surface. It sets LocalContentColor; without it, text without an explicit colour renders black-on-black and disappears.
7. The map zoom clamp. zoomToBoundingBox ignores maxZoomLevel; a short ride will render an empty grid without it.
8. Instrumented tests use in-memory databases. One previously wiped the real device database in setUp.

---

7. Reading order for picking this up cold

1. ../../README.md — what the app is and its current state
2. ../ARCHITECTURE.md — why it is built this way
3. ../v2/PROGRESS.md — every bug found during v2 and how
4. ../TESTING.md — especially "What the emulator cannot verify"
5. ../DEVELOPMENT.md — when you actually need to build something

The v2 planning approach worked well and is worth repeating: one document per task with goal, context, design, acceptance criteria and risks, written before implementing, plus a running progress log recording what actually went wrong. Several bugs were caught precisely because the risk had been written down first — and one (the osmdroid lifecycle) was written down and then walked into anyway, which is its own lesson.