Best way to clean up GPS tracks?

[Lurch]

Some smartphones use the cell network as well as GPS to determine your position. Putting the phone into Airplane Mode while recording forces the phone to use only GPS so that intermittent cell phone reception doesn't throw your position off.

'Assisted GPS' is what you're thinking of, one of it's main benefits is speeding up the time to first fix, since it takes time to pull the ephemerides (short term data) and almanac (long term data) via GPS signal, and it can be fed to your phone of data from the cell towers much faster. They can also aid partially in location data by determining proximity to cell towers, but that isn't very accurate by itself, and doesn't do a lot. The main benefit is more the immediate fix on opening an app requiring location data.

[aiwetir]

I once had a long and useless discussion with Gaia about their track recording intervals.
I included actual repeatable problems, data, track recordings, and data histograms showing their app was pairing points very close to each other then going 10 meters between the pairs.

It was user error according to them. Not sure how you have user error with something that you have no control over as a user.

[wildcat]

We stopped for a break at this trail junction. When I checked our mileage upon arriving and again upon leaving there was a difference of 0.3 miles from all the bouncing around the GPS did while we were standing there. I've never had this happen so severely before with Gaia.

Nice!

I wonder what it would calculate your final milage as if it did that for the entire hike......