The spinning thing is the best you can hope for, but some phones just don’t have good compasses. Sometimes calibrating the compass and then using GPS to get the right heading will fix a phone’s sense of direction for a while, but if the phone keeps losing north, it’s possible you’ll need to recalibrate constantly.

Note that these sensors are affected by nearby magnetic metals, so if you have a metal phone case of some kind, or if you attach it to a metal steering handle, you may be messing up the readings that way. Electromagnetic fields (of, say, a high current wire) can also induce errors, though I’m not sure how you would accomplish such a field while using your phone for navigation.