@JamesChevalier, I’m writing about a problem that’s been going on for perhaps a year. This is in regards to a string of errors when going back to CityStrides in an iPhone browser while walking a neighborhood. At first, it was sporadic, but it’s gotten increasingly consistent… and even more annoying since the required refresh meant losing the map imagery if one has walked into an area with lower cell phone signal. I’ll break it down further…
This short screen capture video shows exactly what happens. (1) I’m walking an area and I turn my phone back on to reference the CityStrides map (or this all happens too when I flip back to the browser from using a different app). (2) I click on Safari to go back to the browser. (3) Instead of showing me the previously-loaded page, the screen first turns black. (4) Then it loads two back-to-back obscenely large zoomed-in views of the CityStrides logos.
(5) I’m now forced to hit Refresh to clear the errors. (6) If I’m now out of cell phone signal, I lose being able to reference my previously-downloaded-and-still-in-my-browser-cache Citystrides map which is extremely frustrating. (7) If I’m in cell phone range, the map will refresh and ask me again if CityStrides is allowed to Access Motion & Orientation. (8) I click allow and then the map goes back to showing my current position in relation to the nearby purple lines.
A few other potentially-helpful notes. I have an Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max on iOS 27.2 (though it did this in iOS 26 too), and I use the built-in Safari browser. But… hmm… I’m noticing right now that it doesn’t do this on the Firefox and Chrome apps. So, uh, I guess I just need to use Firefox instead and my problem is gone, right?? I guess. But I’d still love for the issue to be fixed on Safari since that is the default iPhone app for most people.
This sounds like iOS background app offloading behavior. I was able to eventually reproduce some of the issue by loading my LifeMap & enabling LifeMap Live and then playing a game for a bit. When I returned, there was a flicker like it might have been reloading the page & the LifeMap Live feature wasn’t on any more.
The reproduction steps seem to be:
Navigate to the LifeMap page (maybe any page with a map)
Enable LifeMap Live
This is not really necessary, but it helps to visualize the issue for phones that don’t have the full scope of this issue
Switch to another app for long enough / doing enough other stuff / in an app that uses enough memory (I don’t know all of the underlying rules here) that iOS offloads Safari
Return to Safari
The whole page seems to refresh automatically
The LifeMap Live feature is no longer enabled
On some devices (yours), it seems that page refresh does not happen, instead leaving you in a half-rendered state (that zoomed-in view of the CityStrides logo is effectively the page without any CSS loaded)
Chrome & Firefox use the same underlying engine (WebKit) as Safari in iOS. So it would seem more connected to how those apps do memory management, as opposed to the “browser” being different (it’s not).
As far as the prompt for Access Motion & Orientation is concerned, I have no control over that.
This is probably going to require extensive testing to figure out wtf, so I’m going to need a lot of patience on this.
I’m glad that you could reproduce it… meaning it wasn’t just me.
I solved the problem by making the switch today of finally dumping Safari on my iPhone and going all-in on Firefox instead (which I use anyway on my Windows laptop). Figuring out that CityStrides was safe on Firefox just gave me the final nudge that I needed.
Before you devote extensive time and resources towards this issue, the question is, how many others are experiencing this problem?? I suppose people can chime in here…
I guess. But I’d still love for the issue to be fixed on Safari since that is the default iPhone app for most people.
