Questions about location and privacy, answered. Trip Tracker records your route to a file on your phone and nowhere else, here's exactly how that works.
No. Location is only used while a trip is actively recording. Between trips the app asks for nothing, and you can confirm this yourself: on iPhone in Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services, on Android in Settings → Location → App location permissions. Trip Tracker reports no recent activity unless a trip is running.
That's a standard reminder both iPhone and Android show for any app allowed to keep recording while your phone is locked. It's referring to your actual trips. Trip Tracker records in the background only while a trip is running, so a long route isn't cut short the moment your screen turns off or you switch to another app. Recording stops as soon as you tap Stop.
Every recording session is a trip in your list, with its date and how long it ran. That list is the record of when location was used, there's nothing happening in the gaps between trips.
No, unless you choose to export it. Trips live in files on your device. They only go anywhere when you tap Share to send a GPX file, or when the app saves that file where you can reach it: on iPhone in the Files app, and in your own iCloud Drive if you turn on the optional iCloud backup; on Android in your Downloads folder. There's no account and no server that receives your routes.
That's "Always" on iPhone and "Allow all the time" on Android, and it's so a long trip keeps recording when the system needs to close or pause the app to free up memory. You can grant the while-using level instead and trips will still record; they just may not pick themselves back up if the system closes the app in the background. Either way, location is only ever used during an active trip.
Your recorded route is safe. Trip Tracker saves each point to the file the moment it's recorded, not all at once when you tap Stop, so anything already tracked survives a restart, an app update, or the system closing the app to free memory. When you open the app again it picks the trip back up, and on iPhone, if you granted "Always" location, it can resume on its own in the background without you doing anything. On Android the recording runs as an ongoing notification, which the system rarely stops; after a restart or a force close, open the app to continue. Either way you keep everything recorded up to the interruption; the trip just shows a brief gap for the moment it was closed.
Yes, that's what background location is for. Pocket your phone, lock it, or use another app, and Trip Tracker keeps logging your route until you stop the trip.