MileIQ
reviews and complaints

I've had this app for many many years when I had my salon. They do an automatic renewal and you can't cancel it on the app. You have to go to the site. I did that and they charged my card again today. You have no phone number you can NOT call. They have no email that you can send it to you. Just have to cancel your card at the bank. I would not use them

Got another email today (11/2/22) saying MileIQ has stopped tracking. Turns out it stopped tracking 18 days ago. How. Is. This. Useful?

Post developer response: maybe it’s not supposed to stop tracking, but the message I get literally says “MileIQ has stopped tracking your drives”. I tap on the app icon, it updates, and seems to be working again. If I have time I might email about auto update but maybe I should be able to figure that out… Perhaps it would help, but I stand by my original assessment: this should *notbe happening if my phone is otherwise functioning. Original review: This app will just stop collecting drive data with ZERO warning every 2-6 weeks or so. This seems to be tied to any and all app updates, big and small. No. For a system that is supposed to save me time and energy collecting this data, it is stress inducing because I have no idea what drives were missed during the period of dropped collection. If it’s so important you have to stop the function until an update, let me know that I have xx hours/days/whatever to update or it will stop tracking. Will likely stop my subscription. This isn’t seamless, and it’s promises are too conditional. Also, it is easy enough to classify drives as business, but this app wants you to classify every mile as either business or personal. Deleting non-business mileage is cumbersome and time consuming. I am paying for a subscription so I don’t feel I need to “be the product”; let me just classify what I want and purge the rest.

I'm cheap when it comes to apps. I will use the demo. I will use multiple apps demos one after the other. I will farm for gold in games instead of purchasing it. But this - this app is worth it. I used two methods at once and compared. One method was me resetting my trip odometer every day when I started driving for work, and taking screenshots of each drive when I looked up the address in maps.
And I used this.
This had more miles (= more deductions, paying less taxes) and less headaches (no going through a zillion screenshots on my camera roll - a boring and tedious task.
I classify my drives every day when I'm done, or do it the next day when I'm off or have time. I make reports for each month and throw it into my accounting software. And bam. I'm done.
Way worth the 5 bucks a month, paying for itself just in capturing all the miles - before even getting to all the time it saves me.

My only complaint is that I make delivery drives and don't always have time to stop/start (and don't know how to in the app). So it gloms a bunch of drives together and sometimes that includes my drive home from the final delivery.

I wish it would either give a picture of the whole drive (not just start and stop position), or show stopped time, or somehow let me tune it just a little more finely. That might mean more drives to classify, but it could coordinate with my maps app and see a drive I search up as a "destination" and therefore end the drive once I get there and then start a new one when I leave. I dunno. It's not worth taking away even 1/10th of a star over. I like this app.

I have been using the app for just over a month now and am enjoying it for the most part. I would like to be able to plug in some addresses of places I frequent where I can only identify them with one name right now.

I would also like to be able to go back and edit the categories on some drives. Everything apparently becomes permanent once you do something once so be careful with how you define your entries.

I have to categorize a drive from a to c as multiple drives. For example, if I leave my home office to go to my work office but need to stop off at the gas station or someplace to eat, I have to categorize one drive as personal and the other as business and the mileage doesn't match the typical drive distance from home office to client office.

The most frustrating part is it uses quite a bit of battery when in standby mode. Warning: you cannot close the app without eliminating the auto drive tracking feature. You will have to have the app running in the background whenever you are driving for the app to work. That means remembering to start the app every time you start on your way someplace or dealing with the battery drain when you leave the app running all the time.

Honestly, I could care less about tracking private drives as they won't amount to anything. So, not sure why we can't just have it as an option to just turn off that feature.

Other than what I have stated above, the program is fairly efficient at tracking drives and I like the swipe feature for categorizing the drives. I just hope they can give the program some more bells and whistles to make the program work for everyone's needs.

I would give this app zero stars for the following reasons:
1. For a paid app it doesn’t work all the time. You cannot EASILY EDIT DRIVES BY A QUICK TAP AND CORRECT INSIDE THE APP.
2. Only works if you allow tracking of location ALWAYS. Changing from ALWAYS to ONLY WHEN USING THE APP disables the app even when open and using the app. It forces you to go back and set to ALWAYS.
3. I made two 32 mile trips today after changing the settings back to ALWAYS AND IT TRACKED NEITHER trips. The app was open but it did not track.
4. App trains iPhone X battery very quickly even while plugged in to a charger in the vehicle and especially when not driving because the ALWAYS is always searching and tracking your location even when not driving. App is from a company who has admitted to tracking personal information, along with many others like google and Facebook. Where I go is my business and my business only. To use the app you are forced to allow them to or you are not allowed to use the service much like ALWAYS tracking you has to be turned in.
5. I ha e cancel my subscription and cannot in good faith recommend this app unless you want it to work sporadically, hard to edit, drain your batter even while plugged in and worse when not plugged in, and pay money for something that doesn’t work.
5. I could go on and on but I am sure you get the point. I do t advocate for anyone else’s app either. Good ole pen and paper driving log works just fine. We have enough pay service programs that do not work and track our movements. Concept is great but a LOT of bugs and corrupt concepts with what should be choices in tracking and privacy of our own information.

I am supposed to log my miles for work, but I am miserable at remembering to do it. So consequently I don't get the reimbursement I really am due. My own fault. But this app tracks my drives automatically. No extra effort on my part. It really does! It even logs my runs around the neighborhood as trips. (I think that's awesome, actually, and I'm happy to say "No, that wasn't a speeding car, that was just me running. But I can see why you got confused.")

You do have to swipe every blessed drive segment as business or personal. Seems like having the ability to set some rules would be great. E.g., if it's Monday morning at 7:45 and I drive to my office... That's never just for fun. That's always business.

I would like to see a couple of other small improvements. Little things like the ability to undo a swipe (I don't see any way to do that on my phone); I'd like to be able to teach the app some of my habits (like ... This spot is not a destination, I was just stuck in traffic ... at the same spot where I was stuck in traffic yesterday at this time); I'd also like to be able to manually segment my trips occasionally (sometimes I make a long trip for work, but then a short side trip for personal purposes. Really that is not all work, but I end up calling it work because it was mostly for work. I don't know how much I would use it, but even having a simple guesstimator tool to say... This was all work except for about 3 miles, or something like that would be an improvement.

Overall I think it's a really good app, and I'm actually using it. I even bought the full yearlong license. I think that has already paid for itself and I've only had it for about 3 weeks.

I’m a returning customer, having first subscribed a couple of years ago. I’ve recently needed to track mileage again and 2 weeks ago decided to return to MileIQ and unfortunately, it’s not as great as I remember it being, and I’m regretting paying for the annual subscription.

As a side job, I walk dogs and there are two dogs that I walk every day back to back Monday through Friday for a total of 10 walks which should work out to 15 drives from my house to dog 1 to dog 2 and then home again. Of those 15 drives, MileIQ failed on 6 of those drives to accurately track. This also includes adding parts of my walk with dog 1 into the drive to his house. And then it puts my end point in a random spot along the walk and uses that as my starting point to dog 2. For the drives that I don’t care about and mark as personal, it works fine, but for the drives that really matter, it is failing to live up to my expectations and the need to have to go and edit multiple drives each week defeats the purpose of me paying for this service. I have flagged each of those drives as being inaccurate but I don’t know what that actually does.

Again, I’m a returning customer, and I remember features like splitting up grouped drives and I believe the ability to start and stop drives manually that appear to have been removed since I last was a subscriber. Even the latter would be preferable as an option than having to trust the tracking because right now it’s just not working.

If I had to choose to resubscribe for another year right now, it’d be a hard no for me, and if this problem persists through the rest of the month, I will be requesting a refund and be searching for another app to use for tracking my mileage.

Everyone knows what this app does. And it's good for what it does now. The interface is clean, easy to understand, thought the online dashboard can look a bit cluttered at first glance.

Here's how I think it can get better:

1. Notifications that help you classify more easily. Right now, the only notification I get is when the app is shut down. I'd like to get helpful notifications that let me easily categorize a drive as 'business' or 'personal' with comments about a particular drive. This needs to include the amount for prepaid tolls in that notification. These alerts should go off after I've stopped driving. Currently, I'm caught provisioning drives at the end of my day and I don't think I'm the only person that does not want to use their phone or computer (MileIQ dashboard) after a long day.

2. If you have repeat drives, is there a way I can preload these locations to dashboard so it recognizes the locations I am at or driving to? If not, it should. Why? MileIQ uses mapquest as their mapping tool. It's not detailed a la google maps per se. Meaning, you may try to recognize a drive from last week, but may have trouble because you may not be able to recognize the streets and are not able to see the business around - even online using the dashboard tool. Detail is key in drives. Preloading addresses is a great feature even if you can "name a drive" using the app or dashboard. That just takes too long.

3. Implement an easier way to load tolls for drives.

Detail is key in mileage reports.

MileIQ, reach out to me regarding these user features. I would love to beta test new features and provide additional feedback as requested. I drive daily and report mileage weekly.

Thank you for the great app!

CS.

So, I’ve been a paid customer for over 2 years now and my current annual subscription will be my final. I won’t renew it. I started using this app because I have a startup and work a full-time graveyard job. I can write off the mileage for my startup.

The mileage tracking is off consistently. I drive the exact same 8.7mi route to work every night and to return home each morning. I know it’s 8.7mi because my car’s GPS states it as part of the trip information, after each drive. I’ve searched the exact route on Google Maps and it matches. This app will display anything from 9.2mi to over 14 mi. Rarely does it ever display the correct mileage. So, each day, I have to log into the dashboard to correct the mileage manually for each trip.

After emailing their Customer Success team, Brandon confirmed the disparity exists because their algorithm is based on Bing map data. Still, this issue persists yet the Bing map site reflects the 8.7mi route accuracy as well.

My second issue is regarding the trip detection too. Short trips (less than .5mi) aren’t consistently reflected in the app or dashboard. I live less than this distance from the closest grocery store and I drive because my purchases are too many to carry.

Multi-errand trips have no hope with this app unless you wait at any stop for at least 5mins and drive at least .5mi to your next destination. I live in Los Angeles, commuting is already stressful and optimizing your route is absolutely necessary. Too bad this app won’t always reflect your efficient plan.

These errors make the auto-classifying features useless.

To sum my thoughts, the amount of time spent logging into the dashboard to correct the data exceeds the benefit of paying for the app. Whether it’s updating the mileage or adding destinations, it’s not worth the charge.

I just started working for a Transportation Network Company (TNC) (eg. Uber / Lyft, etc.). The Mile IQ app logged all of my miles, however, out of 21 separate trips, it only logged six separate trips. It would be just way too complicated and time consuming to reconcile the statistics between the TNC and Mile IQ apps. If the Mile IQ app had a "same trip"feature in addition to the "join trips" feature; and if the Mile IQ app were to register the end of a trip at between one and two minutes, ideally 90 seconds or less, then it would be a near perfect app.

As a TNC driver, it is very detrimental to be required to wait at the drop-off location for the apparently five minutes it takes for Mile IQ to register the end of the trip before proceeding to the next pick up location. If the driver takes more than a minute or so to leave for the pick up location, the rider will cancel the request and reorder a ride from a competing TNC driver and or company. This is a missed opportunity of the benefit of having the TNC for both the rider and driver.

As I purchased the monthly upgrade, I will not delete the app; it is still a useful tool to use, and has the potential to accurately keep track of all miles driven, but it just needs it to be a better app.

*- The "same trip" feature that I envision would be on the left side, opposite to the "join drives" feature. What it would do is, upon pressing the "same trip" button, the app would automatically combine the two trips into one single trip instead of just joining the two or more different trips into a single longer distance drive. This would take into account long traffic lights and delays. The "same trip" feature would automatically mark the stoppage as "traffic delay" and would be a better way to account for the time and distance when figuring tax deductions or other audits / inquiries.

The app in and of itself is top notch. Making the platform easily understandable and intuitive in nature by including easy swipe actions to classify drives.

The downside involves a the way the app actually tracks the mileage. When turning off 'drive detection', there are issues in that, when turning it back on, it will recall the drives you took without 'drive detection' on. In addition to that, I was really hoping to see a feature in this app like others, with various different drive tracking options.

***It seems as though the drive detection only tracks starting location and ending location. As construction season is amongst us, there are a variety of different routs. I would like to see tracking for each mile driven as there are many different routes to get to the same location.

Unfortunately, from my limited understanding in using the app, you can drive all around town the roundabout way and this app will only track the Most Common Route. Very disappointed as my pen and paper calculations are more accurate than this piece of tech software. Not only that, but you are not given a select space to insert odometer readings. It's all "automated", for better or worse.

To end on a positive note, as aforementioned, the applications platform well exceeds that of any other apps/mileage trackers I've tried. If you're looking for mileage tracking ONLY, without regard to expense tracking, THIS is the app for you.

I just hope that, with how much this app is per year, the company is making tremendous strides to improve the platform and the tracking methods. After all, if I'm paying $60 a month for a limited software that doesn't improve, you better believe I'll expand my options or compromise on platform & ease of use for better mileage tracking! Especially when competition apps run for a fraction of the price at over 100% cheaper...

Let's see some improvements MileIQ!

I don't write reviews unless I am very happy with use. I started app off first of new year, and before finishing one month I have logged almost $300 off on just one vehicle. The personalization feature allowed me to customize tabs to say whatever I wanted. I have two businesses I operate in same vehicle and the tabs allow me to organize my trips as business realtor or business builder. As for the tracking, I like the fact that the home screen logs all quick trips and long trips on their own individual card with gps points, city info, mileage, the swiping method, and the trash bin. Later in your day you can visit app later and swipe left for personal or swipe right for business. Those tabs I mentioned earlier can be used if you swipe and hold so you suggest a real reason then basic personal/business tab. The more organized you are with custom tab swiping the better for business logs and etc. There is also a way to temporarily shut off the gps tracking say for jogging, carpooling, etc. It gives you a time and day schedule option to reschedule for gps to turn back on again on its own. Though I forget to do this at times brings in another great feature the trash bin. The trash bin option is located on each card in stack on home page. If you realize that a card represents a jogging time or carpooling you can hit trash button and it asks for reason which is one of the ones I mentioned. For those crybabies above about expense, you get what you pay for. For $60 a year for unlimited drives is worth the $18-25k off my taxes for mileage a year. Besides if you drive more than 30 drives you are going to have to pay at some point. However, to get savings like I mentioned above, would you rather save $60 and pencil in your mileage for each business and trip? Lastly, the app downloads all of your trip info into a place where you can go in and print off summaries or save to computer each week. It gives you reminders on email to when reports are in. I hope this helps. Like I said before, I don't write reviews unless the app is amazing! Happy 2016, go log those miles!

This is a fantastic app as others have noticed. However, I am bothered by the fact that, somehow, the app remains active and using GPS even when the app is deliberately closed (user drags app “off” in open app list so it is not open at all in the background theoretically). Somehow, the app installs a tracking component that remains engaged even when the app is closed and not in the active apps list. The only way to completely disable its use of GPS in the app is to turn off background refresh.

This is a problem for me because, since the app still operates somehow even when it isn’t loaded, I always have the GPS indicator showing on the phone and cannot tell when other apps are using GPS or not without consulting the background refresh setting. I had thought that turning the app completely off would remove the background tracking, but it does not. So I am left with choice of either manually turning the background refresh on and off, or just living with my GPS indicator always showing all the time.

It would be absolutely wonderful if the developer gave an option to only have the app use the GPS tracking when it is runningin the background or foreground. Yes, this would mean making sure you don’t force close the app, but this is the case anyway unless you deliberately shut it down. Having it tracking when it is not technically running as an app has downsides: I don’t know of any other app using GPS that continues to run itself even when you have shut down the app. Having one supposedly-not-open app keep your GPS indicator on all the time means you will not know if other apps are using it— a security risk. And, as stated previously, it’s a little creepy to have Mile Tracker’s GPS running even when you have shut it down.

In any case, otherwise this is absolutely terrific. Just beware you will lose the use of your GPS indicator for any other apps, and this app will keep using it even when you’ve closed it deliberately unless you disable background refresh (which you then must turn back on when you open the app and want to have the app work, unfortunately).

There are certain apps that make your life so much easier - like Uber - that you smack your head and say “why didn’t I think of that”. Mileage IQ is another one of those apps. While you’re going about your busy day, traveling from appointment to appointment, it’s seamlessly tracking your every trip. I love that you can tap on the locations it shows and it will bring up more detailed location names that you can choose from, to make it even easier to recognize your trips. As much as I love the app, my accountant loves it even more. At the end of the year, I send him the monthly reports, which makes it much easier for him to decide how best to write off my vehicle expense. A few tips I’ll offer up to those of you considering the app or those new to using it. First, definitely let the app notify you of your trips and immediately categorize them, otherwise the quantity of trips will stack up and become overwhelming. Second, use the naming function to make it easier to recognize your trips. Left to its own devices, the app will just give you the name of the town you went to rather than the name of the store or restaurant. Third, shut off the frequent drives/auto function. That way, you can be sure the app doesn’t miss any trips (I’ve yet to see it do that, despite reading in other reviews that it does miss drives on occasion) and its easier for you to track exactly where and when you traveled when you can see all your trips in sequence, from the start to the end of your day. I’m a bit OCD, so I actually like using the notes function in addition the the trip categories to write more details about a particular trip, so I have a record to refer back to if I need it (and more support if questioned by the IRS). Lastly, add in vehicles other than your work vehicle, so you can distinguish between them - or you can just delete the trips that are not in your work vehicle. If you can develop the discipline to immediately categorize your drives, and make the effort to rename your regular trips, this app will make tax time a cinch - and you’ll probably end up with a much bigger deduction.

Last year I was tracking my mileage for my business in an excel document on Google Sheets. I would write down mileage every time I took a long (greater than 15 minute) business drive, and I ended up deducting about 8000 miles. I downloaded this app last week and it has made this process so much easier. I immediately downloaded the paid version and I love it. I’ve logged 447 miles and 36 drives just this week, which is probably double what I would have logged without it, so this is going to save me a ton of money.

The app interface is awesome. It tracks any time I drive and hasn’t missed one since. You can swipe left for personal, right for business, and categorize those drives (or create custom categories if you wish. I love this.

That being said, the app could use improvements. One thing that the developers can’t really help is how much battery (and probably data) the app uses. Luckily my phone is always plugged in while I’m driving, but one day I forgot my charger and I drove 45 minutes, and my phone went from 80% to 35% (running google maps and MileIQ). This isn’t the developers’ fault at all, so I can’t really deduct any stars for that. It is what it is.

The reason I’m giving four stars though is because I’d like to see a few changes. First, (correct me if I’m wrong) it seems as though I can’t edit a drive after I’ve classified it. I was quickly swiping through a ton of personal drives last week and accidentally logged a 26 mile drive as ‘personal’ and can’t figure out how to change it back to business. Googled it to no avail, can’t find a solution.

Second, I don’t think there is a way to add drives that weren’t logged by mileIQ. I took a business drive from Cincinnati to Detroit before I had the app, and a coworker in Detroit recommended the app, so I downloaded it and logged the drive back. But I can’t manually add the drive from Cincy to Detroit. If you force close the app, forget to turn it back on, and take a long drive, you have no way to log it and those miles are just lost (or in my case, back in the old excel document).

All in all, great app and a huge money/time saver. I’ll be upgrading to the yearly subscription soon, but those two fixes would mean 5 stars from me.

While the user interface and export features are great, starting in 2021 I have been logging my drives in Excel for the past two days in addition to MileIQ.

I have all of the correct settings enabled for the app. Location set to Always. Background App Refresh. Motion and Fitness Enabled. WiFi Enabled. LTE Enabled. GPS Enabled. Background App Refresh Enabled.

However:

On 1/1: I drove 192 Miles. It calculated my driving into 7 trips.

It only logged 167 of the 192 Miles.

On 1/2: I drove 171 Miles. It calculated my drives into 3 trips.

It only logged 144 of the 171 miles.

All of these miles were driven and classified as Business / Tax Deductible.

TOTAL: 58 Missing miles in just two days.

The disparity of “58” missing miles results in a Lost/Missing tax deduction of $33.35 for only 2 days of driving.

I started using this in October. Prior to which I kept a simple excel sheet log of miles driven for business.

I have not yet reconciled my mileage for those months vs the miles logged in MileIQ, however the incorrect logging is very concerning. In just 2 days of normal driving (I drive a lot for business) in 2021 I have already noticed an incorrect / less miles logged = $33.35 tax deduction.

If that is the rough average based on my miles driven MileIQ would miss roughly 7250 miles based on driving 5 days a week / 50 weeks a year = $4168 lost deduction I should receive. (Roughly an additional $1500 in taxes I’d have to pay)

I run on a separate identical model iPhone: An App that has full navigation recording / black box / speedometer that stamps and logs in 1 second intervals. It logs precise GPS Latitude Longitude, Altitude, Speed, G-Force for Turns / Stops... I can play back every drive from start to finish on a Google Maps Overlay.

The mileage on that App vs my Car’s Odometer is only off by a difference of < 1.2% for the entire year. 60,000 Miles and it was only off from my cars Odometer by 706 Miles for the 2020 Year. This is likely due to tire pressure change / tire diameter change due to temperature.

That said: Something is clearly not right with MileIQ. Most of my miles are highway. There no reason it should be missing 58 Miles from 2 days of highway driving.

First off, I use this app every day for work. Been about a full year now. I must admit it's much better at tracking me (with its shortcomings) than I ever was on my own! That says something. It is not a perfect system, but this is not always the apps' fault. I was hoping when M$ bought it, the UI shortcomings would be addressed. Guess we will see on that...

Too all that don't understand these things, MileIQ relies on your phone's environment and
GPS' location services to operate. If your phone battery dies, phone freezes up, or you turn it off, no more tracking. Cell phone signal is not a factor at all for tracking you. That's not how GPS works. If you are in a concrete jungle or restaurant kitchen the GPS can be a block or two off. That is from weird radio wave echoes and shadows, not MileIQ. If you only stop somewhere for 2-3 min it just thinks you are at a stoplight and won't register that you stopped there, but it did track those miles. That will happen sometimes to me, but maybe once a week. More often it thinks I stopped when I didn't, and I just have to join the drives.

There are a few things people should do to make it better. Always keep your phone on charger when in the car. Keep MileIQ app updated and running all the time. Edit location names and use auto-classify to train the app. After you train it, it won't even ask you about repeated trips. Home to grocery store, that's an errand, boom! That is when the app starts to actually be worth the money! It takes a little time and a human to train it though.

Things that HAVE to be addressed IMHO...

First, be able to view past categorized drives in app, similar to the website. Maybe make it a separate screen from unclassified, but make that info available in app! Maybe I went from home to the Walgreens right across the street from my work. No way to change once a gets auto-classified as work commute except on website.

Second Is the reporting. I use this app for 2 week pay-periods but it operates on months by default. Maybe add preference setting for reporting by weeks and not months? Both of these issues make this app a constant chore for me, because I now have to log in from a browser about every other day.

Now may the M$ Gods shine their glory upon us!

1) Takes up too much battery. Before installing it, I could last a full day or even day and a half in a pinch. Now, I’m at 30% by early afternoon. Yes, I have GPS tracking enabled, but it should be smarter about disabling GPS when I’m not actively driving. It also makes my iPhone 7 Plus horribly slow when it’s running in the background, which it has to be to detect drives.
2) Unreliable. If my phone crashes while I’m driving or my battery dies and I don’t have my car charger with me, the drive doesn’t get recorded. I also can’t trust that an app running in the background will catch everything.
3) It isn’t smart about catching brief stops. If I am on a business drive and pause at home for only a few minutes and then go to a restaurant, the app thinks it’s a continuous drive and doesn’t allow me to mark the second leg as personal.
4) The map interface doesn’t make it easy to tell at a glance what the route is. Close-up zoomed images of the origin and destination points make it hard to figure out what the trip was without really struggling to think and recall. Other apps I’ve used show the full route (and then let you pinch to zoom in) and also include the *fulladdress in the origin/destination lines, so it’s very easy for visual people like me to quickly recall what the drive was for.
5) It records drives where I’m a passenger in someone else’s car, and there’s no easy way to delete those drives.
6) It really should be smart and automatically classify drives. Any drive I make to/from/involving my rental properties should automatically default to business unless I override it. Same with frequent business destinations like the paint store, Lowe’s, etc. The “frequent drives” option isn’t good enough—it should allow me to automatically classify any trip to my business destinations as a business trip.

A lot of this could be resolved by offering an optional ODB Bluetooth dongle, which I’d gladly pay for for the extra reliability and better accuracy.

Unfortunately, the app as it is now is sufficiently frustrating that even though it’s free to me with my Office 365 subscription, I think I will be moving back to better options, even though they’re paid ones.

It’s just frustrating because the app is so close to working perfectly, and these annoyances could easily be addressed with a few lines of code. Until then, though, the annoyances are big enough that I have to knock two stars off.

As a user of MileIQ since 2018, I love everything about MileIQ as it is today. Okay, almost everything. I do love the app as it is intended. I like the results I receive. Why’s that you say? I thought you loved it?

Because at times, maybe once every 3-6 months, I have missed drives that I have to input into MileIQ.
Example: I will see my drive to my Pittburgh office from Akron Ohio area, but the return drive will not be there at all, or vice versa, my drive to a destination won’t be there, but my return trip will be…
And my drives aren’t just across town, mine are beyond regional, like Ohio to Texas. Due to the work that I do, I have to drive with my equipment because high altitudes void the equipments calibration. Therefore a missed drive for me, even one way, means at a minimum, is like throwing Grants & Benjamins right out the window.

I believe I have caught most of the missed drives, but the MileIQ app is my tool for receiving mileage reimbursement from my employer so I have developed best practices for myself to ensure trips are not missed. I’ll explain those further below.

The other issue I have had happen more than 5 times is when I’m cleaning up & closing apps on my phone, swiping up on an iPhone, I’ll inadvertently close the MileIQ app. The app is supposed to detect my drives and open itself up, however that’s not the case. I’ve had it miss an entire week! And I didn’t even catch it until it was time to turn in my expense reports. I take partial blame on that one, and I learned a couple of best practices for myself that might help you.

These also help in closing out your month (week, day, whatever).
1- TURN DRIVE DETECTION ON! & always make sure your app is running (in the background) before driving & if you close it when cleaning up your phone (like I have), make sure you open it right back up.
2- Check your app after you’ve driven to your first stop like a gas station or something. Make sure you see that trip, that’s my “verification stop”.
3- At the end of the day & categorize your drives.
4- at the end of the week go back through your categorized trips to ensure you have captured all drives. If you see any trip you made that doesn’t have the corresponding “to” or “from” trip, you need to investigate further, as you may have more missed trips.
5- if you’re going on vacation or for whatever reason you don’t need to track drives for a week or so, go into your settings and turn “drive detect” off, BUT make sure you enter a date for drive detection to automatically turn itself back on.

This app is notable not because it's core functionality -the automated logging of miles driven - is anything new. MileIQ is notable because of three special characteristics:
1) it captures ONLY the GPS activity related to driving. That is to say that it doesn't erroneously capture bicycle rides, golf cart driving, or even riding in a motor-boat. The programmers have built a seemingly perfect logic model which distinguishes between GPS movement resulting from driving a vehicle and GPS movement from other modalities. I am so accustomed to managing my productivity tools that I was completely unprepared for this kind of accuracy. For all of the conveniences technology has made possible, most of it has to be closely monitored and managed. Take Siri for example. I love Siri, and Alexa, and Cortana and all the rest but when was the last time you were able to use a digital assistant with so much confidence that you didn't have to double check that your voice had been heard correctly? I dictate my text msgs to Siri but I ALWAYS have to correct items before sending. But imagine if you used Siri for three months to dictate complete emails and that she made no errors during the three months. That is what using MileIQ is like. 100% accurate. Like, seriously, it has never made a mistake. Certainly I did babysit the app for the first couple of months of use fully expecting some margin of error but I soon discovered that it works astonishingly well. Ok sorry for waxing poetic... on to feature #2

2) MileIQ recognize patterns and uses them to automate the process of classifying each drive. Itinerary seems like you have to use the app for a certain time before this feature kicks in. Presumably it needs a minimum baseline of history. Once that history is in place you'll begin to be prompted when MileIQ senses a pattern. For example, i usually drive to work at 6:45 am. When you first start using the app you have to manually classify your drives as either personal or business. You may further define with more detailed purposes. So after I had classified my commute as such MileIQ asked whether to automatically classify future drives as a personal commute. I wasn't sure how to answer because I did t want every trip from my home to the office to classify as a commute. Since I often work from home, sometimes the drive should be classified as a business trip. I went ahead and answered yes and I was impressed to find that the system uses additional information to identify drives such as time of day, history, day of the week, and the days you define as work days before autoclassifying any drive. Therefore, a one-off visit to home in the middle of the day to eat lunch doesn't automatically classify as a personal commute. This kind of nuanced decision making is incredibly sophisticated and simply brilliant. At least for me, it works every single time exactly the way it should. It is uncanny how accurate this thing is!
3) the ability to name frequently visited locations and to assign them to work or personal categories.

These are just some of the features which separate what MileIQ does from, say, an IFTTT applet or Workflow Which logs Every movement you make including bicycle rides and so forth. There may be those who want those kinds of trips to be logged and for those people MileIQ may not be the best option. But for anyone who needs to accurately capture every mile they drive (businessmen, volunteers, employees who are paid mileage, etc), there is no better tool for the job than this one.

Lastly, I want to publicly thank MileIQ (now part of Microsoft) for their generous support of nonprofit organizations. As CEO of a medium nonprofit, we have taken full advantage of the unprecedented level of charitable technology donations Microsoft makes available. Thanks to Microsoft, we are able to leverage incredibly sophisticated, state of the art technology because Microsoft makes it available at little or no cost to us. Microsoft frankly puts Apple to shame when it comes to charitable donations. Apple should be embarrassed that they have no program in place to support charitable orgs whatsoever. As a longtime Apple devotee, at least within the iOS product line, It is frustrating to know that a company as wealthy and profitable as Apple doesn't offer any fixed discounts, let alone product donations, to any NGO. The only donations of any kind that i can find any information about is limited to educational institutions. If there are any such donations available, Apple doesn't make information about them publicly available and/or easy to find. In contrast, you can search for nonprofit pricing on any Microsoft website, from tech net to the MS store and you will be directed to a wealth of information about the vast support for nonprofit organizations. This really demonstrates microsoft's core values. Any company that is this committed to making our community a better place deserves your patronage. Last year alone Microsoft donated $22,511 worth of software and services to my organization alone, including 25 licenses of their top tier premium subscription to Office365 (called e3 edition), 8 licenses of the mega premium e5 o365 licenses, Server 2012 licenses, windows 10 enterprise licenses, enterprise security and mobility including multi factor authentication licenses, Skype PBX licenses with dialing plans, technical support services, terminal server licensing, SharePoint server,and Azure Active Directory premium licenses and now, MileIQ licenses!

One last comment- you might assume , based on the heaps of praise for MS, that I have a bias towards MS. The truth is I absolutely do have bias but this review is 100% honest and truthful and based on my actual experience using the software. I wouldn't have positive things to say about some other MS products like Streets and Trips or Windows 8. These were terrible. But MileIQ is in a league all its own. Try it and you'll love it. The end.

I had this app on Android and I have had the app for 4-5. Last year, the app didn’t track any drives for a month. I was told it was my fault, because I restarted my phone and didn’t reopen the app…ok, that’s plausible. Now, I have made sure that whenever I do a restart or update or whatever, I reopen this stupid app, but for the past 2 months, it hasn’t tracked a single mile. I don’t usually “assign” everything until the end of the month. I was so busy this year however I forgot, and I’ll be damned, it didn’t log ANY. I log miles for tax purposes because I travel so much for work, and no joke, this app and the developer and whoever else involved cost me $4500+ in write offs. I’m not some disorganized individual, I’m already trying to submit my taxes, in January… Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and you’re done. Do Not download or use this service. It’s so infuriating I’m nearly to the point of taking legal action.

This used to come with your Office 365 subscription. Company announced it was going independent and quality of product went down hill from there.

First the app would not send me my monthly reports anymore. Everyone at this company blamed my phone, or that my password was not secure enough. After about a month, they fixed the problem on their end blaming the transition from Microsoft to themselves.

Now, and still not fixed, after 3 months, I no longer receive badge notifications. Again, blaming my equipment. Saying to make sure I have that feature activated. And to update app and iPhone.

This company will not accept the fact that indeed it is their programming that has the error. Instead, they choose to point the finger elsewhere.

Not a good app and even worse customer service.

There are plenty of apps out there that do the same exact thing more reliably.

Hopefully, this company fires the CEO and hires someone who actually knows how to run a business.

I used MileIQ until a software update in October 2022. In my effort up upgrade, I logged out of the app and lost my login credentials. I started a new profile to keep their service, as I liked this app prior to this experience. I believe my annual subscription fee was due about this time as well. I thought I paid it, but I do not have a record of it.

Now there are two logins on file and I am unable to access either one of them. Support tickets to figure this out took several weeks. Finally, I decided to not sign back up due to delays and lack of support.

For the past several weeks, I’ve requested my mileage records to submit for tax purposes for 2022 and they will not send me the details, give me the login information so I can access my records myself or provide any other solution. At this time all miles gathered in 2022 are unavailable (estimated $7800-$10,000 in tax deductions).

The app is great at gathering your details, but if you can’t get the reports, it’s worthless.

I’ve using Mileage IQ since March last year. Now that is time to report taxes I’ve been analyzing my trips and noticed I am missing some drives and realized that the app doesn’t detect if you don’t stop for several minutes (not sure how many. Called support and the guy said between 10-15 minutes). Here is my review for each of the sale points mentioned in the description:
- Easy to use. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Very easy to classify the drive with a second level classification for personal and business drives.
- Automatic Mileage detection. ⭐️⭐️
It doesn't detect a final stop less than 10-15 minutes. It would be great to have the ability in the app to indicate the drive is ended.
- Accurate Mileage Tracking. ⭐️⭐️
Most critical feature of the app. If miles are not accurate what is the purpose of using it?
- A custom fit. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Web version very useful for analyzing and bulk classification.
In general it is a great app but accuracy issues have to be fixed.

I called support and the guy said there are new features being tested so would like to know when will be released. Please don’t redirect me to email support as I’ve seen this issue being reported at least since 2017 with the same response (transparency is important)!

Having used Mile IQ for several weeks, I keep being progressively more frustrated with this app. This is the first Microsoft application that I believe that Microsoft should be ashamed to have inflicted on the Marketplace.

If you need to keep records of distinct visits to different locations that are physically closer than about 1/4 mile, this will prove to be hopelessly frustrating.

I’m getting very close to giving up on this abomination!

My first comments follow:

Recently, I started using MileIQ because of frustration with a competitor’s application. Rather than being much better, MileIQ has proven to just be less bad. It has proven to not be reliable in sensing and recording drives (an even more common problem for the other app), and it sometimes stops recording a drive somewhere during the drive (also a more common problem with the other app).

MileIQ does not handle nearby different locations well. Although very distinct, (such as on opposite sides of a wide street and hundreds of feet apart), both locations will be treated as being the same one.

Unlike the other app, MileIQ does provide a reasonably convenient way to edit, add, or delete drives. For now, this is my main reason for continuing using MileIQ.

UPDATE Sep-2020
Still does not log miles reliably, despite all the time I spent seeking help and following every single suggestion of theirs. Don’t get this app, there are better ones. My current favorite is Everlance. I will be seeking a refund from MileIQ shortly.

UPDATE Jun-2020
Ever since the latest iOS update, the app has been completely useless. I have followed every single one of their suggestions, I submitted a help ticket, and all they do is make the same suggestions over and over even though I have already told them I am following them to the letter. Location services always on, background app refresh, I keep the app running in the background, etc. Still, it is completely useless. Does not log my drives except the rare times when it does (perhaps one out of 10 drives), it shows either the wrong origin or wrong destination, completely wrong time of day, and ridiculous time enroute. For example, 8 miles in five minutes. The drive was at least 20 minutes long, possibly 25. I intend to request a full refund, or demand it if necessary, and find another app to work with. Don’t waste your time with this piece of junk, go elsewhere. Run, don’t walk. You’ve been warned.

Using this app for six months at this point. Works great, integrates well with their website. Only feature I wish the app would do is to allow me to edit drives that I have already categorized. Categorized drives can be edited on the website but not on the app. Other than that, it’s a good app.

First of all, I do want to say that the app itself is pretty good and simplifies mileage tracking for tax purposes. I think it is a little overpriced, though, in comparison to Intuit Quickbooks in terms of what it does and for the price.

However, the reason I have been compelled to write this review, and I haven’t written a review on anything in the last year, is the extremely frustrating time I have had with trying to cancel my membership. I do not ever recommend giving MileIQ authorization to bill your ITunes account. If for whatever reason you ever become locked out of your Itunes account (such as 2-FA and no longer have the ability to access or regain the phone number you used for 2-FA), MileIQ will not help you in any way to stop the monthly bleed from your checking account. It would be a small charge to most, but for me it was absolutely infuriating to not be able to do anything about it other than completely obliterate the payment method that it was being billed to. For this reason and extremely frustrating and time consuming experience, I am assigning a 1-star review.

I do have one other decent thing to mention about them, though, to just make this deleterious review more fair. Unlike many things these days, their customer service is actually fairly accessible either through online chat or by phone, so I can give them credit for that. It is just extremely frustrating that they will do nothing at all to help a customer cancel a membership that is lining their pockets.