System and methods are disclosed to use information available on the state of mobile devices in a heuristics-based approach to improve motion state detection. In one or more embodiments, information on the WiFi connectivity of mobile devices may be used to improve the detection of the in-transit state. The WiFi connectivity information may be used with sensor signal such as accelerometer signals in a motion classifier to reduce the false positives of the in-transit state. In one or more embodiments, information that a mobile device is connected to a WiFi access point (AP) may be used as heuristics to reduce the probability of falsely classifying the mobile device in the in-transit state when mobile device is actually in the hand of a relatively stationary user. Information on the battery charging state or the wireless connectivity of the mobile devices may also be used to improve the detection of in-transit state.