Tracking cycling speed with your phone

A phone in a handlebar mount is a perfectly good bike computer. It has a GPS receiver as capable as a dedicated head unit, a much better screen, and it costs nothing extra.

The number cyclists actually care about

Not “average speed” — average moving speed. The distinction is the whole reason serious cycling apps exist.

• Average speed is total distance divided by total elapsed time. Every red light, every stop to fix a chain, every coffee at the halfway point drags it down.
• Average moving speed is total distance divided by the time you spent actually moving.

A 60 km ride at a genuine 25 km/h with a twenty-minute café stop shows 25 km/h moving and about 21 km/h overall. The first number describes your riding. The second describes your day.

The bike speedometer shows both side by side, along with the moving time, so you can see exactly how much you stopped.

Getting good data on a bike

• Mount it where it can see the sky. A handlebar mount is ideal. A jersey pocket works, but your body blocks a meaningful fraction of the sky and accuracy suffers.
• Wait for the fix before you roll. Watch the accuracy figure settle under ±10 m. Starting cold means the first minute of your ride gets filtered out.
• Expect tree cover to hurt. Dense woodland is the worst realistic environment for a bike GPS; wooded singletrack will show far more filtered fixes than an open road.
• Speed, not cadence or power. GPS measures how fast you are moving over the ground. It cannot know your cadence, heart rate or power output — those need sensors.

Elevation

Altitude is reported and cumulative ascent is tracked, but treat both as approximate. GPS vertical accuracy is roughly two to three times worse than horizontal, which is why small changes are ignored entirely and only climbs above a 3 m threshold accumulate. If total ascent matters to you, a barometric altimeter is the right tool.

Getting rides into Strava

Save the ride, then export GPX from the trips page. Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot, RideWithGPS and Google Earth all import GPX directly — in Strava it is Upload activity → File. The export carries per-point speed and timestamps, so pace analysis and segment matching work normally.

CSV is also there if you would rather look at the raw numbers in a spreadsheet.

Battery

Continuous high-accuracy GPS with the screen on is the most power-hungry thing a phone does. For a long ride:

• Leave the screen wake lock off and let the display sleep — tracking continues either way.
• Carry a small power bank for anything over a couple of hours.

Sources

• W3C Geolocation API defines coords.speed, coords.altitude and coords.altitudeAccuracy, the fields behind the speed and elevation figures.
• GPX 1.1 schema is the format the trips page exports: track points with timestamps that Strava, Garmin Connect and Komoot import directly.
• Strava Year in Sport publishes aggregate ride statistics across its riders, a reference point for what typical moving speeds look like.