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Elevation and ascent figures produced by any application I've used are sometimes suspect.

We do appreciate your feedback and certainly aren’t dismissing the concern, but we’ve already spent quite a bit of time looking into this issue in the past and haven’t managed to identify any major problems with our calculation methods, so that’s why we’re reluctant to spend more time on it. 

People have often cited GPS recordings as “correct” when GPS figures differ from ours, but every time we’ve looked at examples, the GPS recording has been flawed. Often there are gaps in the recording or the recorded positions are clearly inaccurate. One person was adamant that his GPS was 100% accurate as it had a barometric altimeter fitted, but when we looked at the data it was recording, it was showing him 90m above sea level when he was next to the sea! 

Having said that we also accept that our own calculations are not without flaws, but unfortunately every project has a cost and we have many thousands of users who all want us to focus on different things, so we have to choose what we spend our time on based on what we think will make the biggest difference for the majority of people.  As much as we would love to improve our elevation data, we’ve come to the conclusion that we’re chasing our tail by trying to make our calculations match those from other sources and that we’re better off spending our time on other things at the moment. 

At present our top priority is to develop a mobile app for offline navigation, so that’s where our time is currently focused, but I’ll repeat what I said below, if any of our users have experience in Digital Elevation Models and programming skills and would be interested in volunteering to carry out a review of our approach and algorithms, please get in touch.

OK, no worries. Thanks for listening. I'm certainly not dismissing the complexity either. Good luck with the mobile app :-)