Every tracked event used to start the same way: a van full of hardware. Dedicated GPS units rented at £20–£40 a head, charged in banks the night before, handed out at registration, zip-tied to frames, and — the part nobody budgets enough time for — chased back at the finish from riders who have already driven home.
We built Aster on a simpler observation: every athlete on the start line is already carrying a GPS tracker. It's in their jersey pocket. It has a battery they charged themselves, a data connection they already pay for, and they will absolutely not leave it at home.
What the phone gets you.
No rental fee. The £20–£40 per head that events pass on to riders — or absorb — simply isn't there. For a 200-rider event, that's thousands of pounds that can go back into the event, or not get charged at all.
No logistics. Nothing to charge, label, hand out, or collect. Registration becomes "you're on the list", not "here's your unit, sign here, it comes off your deposit if we don't get it back".
No chip timing rig either. Start gates, checkpoint splits and finish detection come from the same live positions. The finish line is a line on the map, and crossing it is the timestamp.
The honest bit: phones aren't perfect.
We'd rather tell you the trade-offs than have you discover them. Phones have two weaknesses as trackers: signal and battery. Here's what we actually do about them.
Dead zones don't lose the ride. Remote events go where the signal doesn't. So the app never depends on a connection to do its job: a rider can start at a trailhead with no bars at all, ride all day through the valleys, and everything records on the device. When signal returns, the backlog uploads and the trail fills in on the map — the whole trail, not just the part after the mast. Start, track and finish all work fully offline; the network is only ever a delivery mechanism.
Battery is a budget, and we spend it carefully. Continuous GPS at full resolution would flatten a phone by lunch. Aster is tuned for endurance: tracking runs all day on the phone the athlete started with. And if a battery does die at hour fourteen of a bikepacking race, nothing is lost — the ride is safe on the device and picks up where it left off when the phone comes back.
The app can't be quietly killed. Phones aggressively shut down background apps to save power. We treat that as a design constraint, not a surprise: tracking survives the app being closed, the phone being restarted, and the operating system doing its worst. Once you tap Start, only you decide when the ride ends.
Free for athletes. Actually free.
The economics of hardware tracking made someone pay per head, every event. Phone tracking removes that cost, so we removed the charge: tracking, sharing your live track, and being followed cost athletes nothing. Not a trial. Not a feature tier. Organisers pay for event tooling — leaderboards, finish detection, the spectator map — because that's where the value lands.
A tracker you already own, watched by people who only need a link. That's the product. The van full of hardware can stay in the depot.
