Offline tours and tour downloading is a core feature of BitGym.
There are multiple possible reasons why tours are not downloading correctly.
First of all, make sure that BitGym has received the requisite permissions to write data to your device storage.
If the download button is not responding
Make sure your device or BitGym has not "frozen" by going back to the previous screen, and coming back to the preview screen to tap the button again. It should quickly change to a progress bar saying "0 %".
If you see an error when you start a download
The most common error is insufficient disk space — you need between 2GB and 4GB to download a BitGym tour.
How much space does a BitGym tour download really need?
A BitGym tour download has 3 steps
- Download a "zip" archive from the BitGym server
- "Unzip" the archive into a full BitGym tour on your device
- Delete the leftover archive
Step 1 typically takes about 80% of the time, and uses 1-2GB of free space. Step 2 requires an additional 1-2GB of space. Step 3 then clears up the space taken up by Step 1, leaving behind a tour that uses 1-2GB of space. This is the number indicated on the download button.
If you do not have at least 2 x the space indicated on the download button available on your device, BitGym will raise an error that the download cannot complete.
If the download starts, but does not progress past 0%
Most commonly in this case the download is working, but taking a long time to get from 0% to 1%. This means your internet connection is somewhat slow. We recommend
- moving your phone/tablet as close to your WiFi router as possible
- opening fast.com from a browser on your device — this will tell you the download speed of your connection
Interpreting results from fast.com:
- 500 Kbps should download a bitgym tour in 5 - 10 hours
- 1 Mbps should download a bitgym tour in 2.5 - 5 hours
- 10 Mbps should download a bitgym tour in 15-30 minutes
- look into upgrading your internet connection if the speed displayed above is too slow.
A less common case, is if you are on an Android device with an SD card, your SD card has a slow memory speed or is faulty, but registers as a valid destination for BitGym tours. You can try closing BitGym, removing your SD card, restart BitGym and try download a tour again, and if it works properly, you may want to upgrade to a faster SD card. We recommend a SanDisk Extreme SD card or microSD card, depending on which format your device uses.
If the download reaches 80%, and then you receive an error
The most common error at this stage is "Could not initialize zip archive". This is usually due to one of 2 causes: running out of disk space between starting Step 1 (of the 3 steps as described above) and Step 2, because of other activity on your device, or multiple simultaneous downloads, or secondly a write permission restriction exists on part of your storage. If you have an SD card in an Android device with plenty of free space, the second cause is more plausible.
The download only progresses when I have the app open
Referencing the 3 steps again, step 1 can continue in the background once you start the download*. However, step 2 and step 3 can only happen while the BitGym app is open. So if the download is very slow, you can "close" BitGym and continue to use your phone/tablet, but you will have to open BitGym and wait a few minutes for the last 20% of downloads to finish. However, note that if your device runs low on "runtime memory", the download may not complete reliably.
ℹ️ *On Android, check if you have "Data Saver" enabled in your settings. If you do, step 1 cannot take place in the background either, unless you allow BitGym unrestricted background data access. See this Google support article for how to reach this Setting, and enable background data access for BitGym.
If your download speed is fast (1% progress every 15 seconds or faster), we recommend leaving the BitGym app open until your download is complete to 100% to mitigate any errors incurred by waiting too long between step 1 and step 2. The best way to ensure this is to
- adjust your device settings to not automatically lock the screen. On Android, you can specify this to be the case only when charging. You can reset this setting back to default after your download is complete.
- keep your device plugged in to its charger
- have the BitGym app open, where you can monitor the download
We recommend not using your device for the duration of the download if they are not completing successfully in the background.