Companion app map recenter button is very broken

If you use the companion app map tab to give frequent ride-ons (or, for that matter, if you use it at all), it is frustratingly easy to inadvertantly cause your position to drift somewhere off the map, rendering the map useless until this is corrected. There is a “crosshairs” recenter button on the right (center-right in only the middle image below), but this button is not always made visible, and not when it should be.

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The only way to easily give riders ride-ons (an issue in itself) is to tap on the (tiny, difficult-to-see if you are zoomed in) white circle around your rider position in the companion app map tab. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly easy when riding to miss tapping this small and often moving target and either tap empty background or a nearby rider. Tapping a nearby rider causes them to become followed/centered, while tapping empty space causes the following to stop. There is no way to switch back to following/centering your own rider except by clicking the crosshairs button. However, the crosshairs button is not made visible when you switch which rider is followed, or when you tap empty space! As a result, your rider drifts off the screen. All you can do is drag the map some distance (half a screen?) to cause the crosshairs button to appear and then click it. This behavior is ridiculous.

The easiest fix for this would be to either always show the crosshairs button, or show it any time your rider/position is not being followed/centered. It should not take dragging the map a certain distance to make it appear.

A bit off-topic, the mechanism for giving multiple ride-ons is terrible UX. Many users don’t know about it, and it is very hard to use for the reasons explained above. It seems like either a temporary bodge or an easter egg. Wouldn’t it be much, much better to just have a button on the right to do thtis than have to locate your tiny rider position (not always in the center due to the bug above and the fact you can intentionally scroll the map) and try to touch exactly it and nothing else? I suspect part of the reason it isn’t a separate button/icon is because of the confusion between giving ride-ons and playing the “ride on!” sound that already uses the overloaded thumbs-up icon.

Yeah, the recenter button only showing sometimes is a very strange choice. It’ll show when my map is waaaaaay off from my position, and it’ll show when my map is ‘pretty close’ to centered on me. But if I’m off on the corner of the screen, but still on the screen, it’s gone.

I don’t find it to be too problematic, but it also shouldn’t be too hard to make it visible at all times when you’re not centered.

A quick workaround:

You can make the Crosshairs button show when you use two fingers to zoom in/out. Then you can click it to center the screen.

I know you’re trying to be helpful, but I already know the workarounds (I described one; yours has the additional unwanted effect of changing the zoom).

I posted my message as a bug report, not a support request, and am hoping for someone from Zwift to respond acknowledging either that it is a known bug or that it has now been entered into their issue tracking system to (hopefully) get fixed sooner rather than later. It is unfortunate that this forum category is “Bugs and Support”. When all I’m doing is trying to notify Zwift of a bug, and not asking any questions, the “Support” part encourages other users to reply with workarounds that tend to diminish the effect of filing a bug report and expecting a fix.

I’m not sure that’s the case. I suspect (unfortunately) that something like this would have a low priority, but that the Zwift team are pretty well aware of how it’s working/not working without people’s workarounds posted.

That said, sometimes things like this are an easy fix that can be tossed onto the pile even if it’s a low priority. Fingers crossed.

As a software engineer myself, I always appreciated when we had “bug fix sprints” where the development priority was for us to pick off low hanging fruit like this and knock out as many easily fixable bugs as possible in a couple weeks, to clear out the issue backlog and make users happy without the only priority being cranking out profit-driven new features.

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Very effective sort of strategy, I imagine. I know a lot of engineers, and I suspect they are also happy to be able to check things off of lists. On some level, the size of the thing being checked off doesn’t even matter. When I need to feel like I’m productive, I make To Do lists that are as granular as possible. “Send that email”, “Do Laundry”.

Still a bug. Still super annoying.