Posted 18 July 2025

This blog post is for the application state as of July 2025, and should be considered historical information.

Whats new

We've just release version 5.1 of our application. We believe this this the biggest update to date!

Whats new:

• Indoor Ski Resort Support
• POI Search capabilities
• Pre-Ski GPS prompt
• All progress map
• Various Bug fixes

Indoor Ski Resort Support

We know true ski fans practice all year around, even when its 32 degrees in summer!

Piste now supports the top indoor ski resorts in europe using our newly developed AI! We now track your run times indoors without GPS, and It's even smart enough to know which lift you take!

A total of 14 hours of training data went into developing the model and its pretty accurate boasting a 98.8% model accuracy and a near 100% real-use accuracy.

We are aware not everyone skiis (or snowboards) like us, over the coming months we will offer select users an opportunity to submit their training data in exchange for a unique profile badge. So if you ski regularly in an indoor ski resort you may get a prompt. Any data goes to improving the AI model to work for more users and phones.

Requirements

• IOS 14+ or Android Phone
• Accelerometer, Gyroscope and Barometer
• Piste 5.1 or greater.

If your phone does not have a barometer, don't fret, we are trying to build a pure inertia sensor model and if you're reading this blog we would love for you to be among the first to try it out. Email beta@pisteapp.com for more information!

POI Search

So this is a bit of long one, you may have noticed piste has lacked any updates over the last several months.

In February 2025 it became clear our current method of delivering and obtaining Ski Map data was unsustainable, we would take the raw crowd source data from openstreetmap and apply progressive fixes to it which slowly got more complicated with each change.

To keep up with the huge number of changes 140 resorts brings, We've had to flip this completely and we now have our own internal ski database we can import stuff into.

The good news is that it has brought many benefits which are starting to flow to our lovely users. The first benefit is a tighter integration with the data, we now catalog and capture incredibly mundane ski related things which previously was not possible.

Things like bus stops, Piste now only shows you bus stops that are free & covered by your ski pass. Town names are now named the same as they appear on the paper ski map. Our future captures involve lesson meeting points for all the ski schools, apres ski bars, restaurants, information centers, lift pass offices and many more.

Pre Ski Prompt

This was a large source of contention, a popup that gets in the way of the users starting skiing? madness! However, we had a problem with the Indoor ski slope system - there is actually no way to tell if you are indoors, even if we could - we couldn't tell which indoor slope you were at! So we had to create a UI to ask 'Hey are you indoors right now?' without being obnoxious to our outdoor skiers. This UI turned into a great pre-ski checklist tool to ensure everything gets recorded properly and benefits outdoor skiers as well as indoor skiers.

When you start skiing the prompt tries its best to obtain an accurate GPS lock,

• If a GPS lock is acquired -
  • It checks you are in a supported resort
    • It then checks you have that resort installed
      • If you don't - a handy alert pops up asking you to install the resort before setting off
      • If you do - you carry on skiing as usual and the prompt disappears.
  • If you are not in a supported resort - it informs you of the case
• If a GPS lock is not acquired
  • It asks you to select an indoor ski resort from a list or install one.

All Progress Map

You can now view an entire resort's completion map, every single run, lift and challenge is displayed in either red or green. We've had this idea from day 1 and we're happy its finally brought to life, we want you to paint the entire mountain green and see exactly where you haven't been.

Bug Fixes

We are aware of so many bugs and unfortunately we genuinely cannot get around to squashing them all But we sorted our some fairly major ones this release

• User profile chits were flickering on the map - This was annoying and took some mapbox hackery to fix
• Failing to zoom into a selected item - The map screen should now show you what you've selected every time.

Bugs we are aware of and still trying to fix

• Low FPS when following a link to the map screen. All our debug tools say 60FPS but we all clearly see 5FPS on screen!

The Future

What to expect for the next update

To be honest it'll be just some bug fixes and some GUI additions to the All Progress map. Those with a keen eye may see some hidden technology making a test in the all progress map, that will soon make its way onto the main map screen 😉