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What rides along on a trip: planning for several days, road profiles, maps without signal, group rides and the voice in your helmet.

MotoNavigator is more than a map with an arrow. A trip is made of evenings when it takes shape, mornings when it changes, and days without signal. These are the parts that ride along through all three.

Planned ahead: the trip the evening before

Half the trip happens before the engine starts. Evening, in a hotel or on the couch, a glass of something good, the map in front of you, on your phone or iPad. Drop waypoints, drag them into order, set one on a place with a tap. Two waypoint types decide whether you just want to pick a road up on the way or plan a real stop, with a wait time that feeds into the arrival time, and whether the navigator may turn around there. The hotel at the end of the day is a stop. Control, not clutter.

And behind it sits the Organizer: your home for routes, POIs and whole collections. You create POIs yourself or adopt them straight off the map: the café that the OpenStreetMap world already knows becomes yours with one tap. Routes get saved, reloaded, rebuilt, sorted and shared, as a file, with whoever you choose. Anticipation can be planned. This is where it lives.

The app runs on the iPad too. The layout there is still the phone’s, just bigger, and the polish for the large format is still to come. For planning in the evening, the room is already enough.

Fresh every morning: destination, profile, ride

Some trips have no plan, only a direction. The sky looks right, the bike stands warm outside the door, and the one decision you’re up for today is a thumb on the map. That works too: set a destination, pick a profile, ride. The app finds the road in between, all you have to do is ride it. Arrive, coffee, next destination, onward. No panel, no fine-tuning, no guilty conscience.

In the end that’s a proper tour too, recorded like any planned one. The app is built for planners. And for the days the planner in you has clocked out.

Several days, several countries

A trip over several days lives as a folder in the Projects tab, one route per entry, in the order you drag them into place. Each route brings its own profile: the ride out as Tourer, the dirt day as Adventure, the ride home as Tourer again. If you build a day from several sections, make it its own sub-folder and switch on Auto-advance there: when one section ends, the next one loads by itself. No prompt, no “Would you like to continue?” With one entry per day, the switch stays off, otherwise the app starts the next day’s route as soon as you arrive at the hotel. The variants sit in the folder too: the one over the pass, the one down in the valley, in case the forecast starts lying on Thursday. Whatever you don’t want to ride, you set to Disable, and the app skips it. More on that under Navigation modes.

Tours from a forum, from a buddy or from ten years of collecting open right in the app, as GPX or .mnav. They leave as a file too, through your phone’s share menu: everyone reads GPX, and .mnav carries everything GPX has no field for: folders, order, wait times, profile.

And the countries? Maps are available for the whole world. You download the ones for your trip beforehand, ideally over Wi-Fi, not at the pass: big countries weigh several gigabytes. In return, all countries come from one build: the same data release, the same roads, the same rules, the same routing graph. At the Brenner Pass, nothing bumps into something it has never met.

Four profiles, one character per route

Four profiles come built in. Fast gets you away from home quickly on the first and the last day of a trip, and back again, freeway included. Tourer takes the backroad instead of the freeway, with curves and scenery. Adventure Light takes gravel gladly, but with restraint, and Adventure prefers gravel and dirt roads to pavement wherever they exist. You switch per route, not per waypoint: a tour has one character, a trip may have several, one per stage. What each profile is like on the road is covered in Navigation modes.

With signal: the road with character

With signal, the app steps it up. The route is then calculated on our servers, where each road carries more knowledge than the phone holds. Where there are several sensible ways, it takes the one with fewer traffic lights and roundabouts and leaves the big cities off to the side, without a big detour for it. Curves count as quality: a hairpin is something different from a long sweeper, and a roundabout is not a curve. The scenery counts too. Same trip, finer finish.

Without signal, the phone calculates on its own, and the profile stays what it is: Tourer stays Tourer, Adventure stays Adventure. The phone knows the roads, not the curves, the views and other details. The version that works everywhere.

Offline, abroad too

The best roads share one trait: where they run, no network planner ever volunteered a tower. So with us a lot lives on the device: map, route, recalculation. Took a wrong turn where there’s been no signal for twenty kilometers? The phone recalculates, in the same profile. Curves, views and other details only the server knows, but the phone gets you there anyway. The app switches between online and offline by itself; there is no offline switch.

A few limits come with it. The first launch needs a connection: the app checks in once, without an account, and fetches the map catalog. You download the maps beforehand; without a downloaded country the app has no road map and calculates no route there. And after 30 days at the latest, the app wants to talk to our server for a minute. A café with Wi-Fi is enough. For the ride itself you don’t need signal.

Where data roaming gets expensive, you switch it off at the border and ride on. The navigation doesn’t notice.

Even without a road

Off-road, taken literally. Desert, steppe, dune field: where there’s no road, MotoNavigator switches instead of quitting. In NoRoad mode you navigate by waypoints and bearing: on the map the line to the next point, plus the distance as the crow flies, instead of “turn right in 300 meters.” The terrain decides the way in between. And you. Not a hidden emergency mode but an equal path next to road routing. How NoRoad relates to road routing and to a GPX line of your own is covered in Navigation modes.

Group rides, without flooding the group chat

No fumbling with usernames, no friend lists, no account matching, no other nonsense. One person opens the group, the others scan the QR code, done, riding. The host decides how long the group lives: until midnight, 8 or 14 days. Everyone has the same plan, and when it changes, everyone has it again, by itself. No account, display name of your choice.

Group rides naturally need signal, since the others’ positions don’t arrive by carrier pigeon. A dead zone won’t throw you out, though: while it lasts there are simply no updates, and once the signal is back, it carries on. Nobody rejoins, only the time in the dead zone doesn’t get filled in afterward. One limitation: as long as you’re leading the group, Auto-advance won’t move on by itself, and you start the next section by hand.

On the bars: CarPlay

Factory display or an aftermarket mount at the cockpit: if your motorcycle has a CarPlay-capable display, the navigation mirrors straight onto it. The map, your position, the route, the next turn with icon and distance, plus remaining distance and arrival time. Ride actions sit as buttons on the display, so there’s no need to glance at the phone.

The display has no opinion of its own: it shows what the phone calculates, in real time, with no extra setup and no second app. One requirement: an iPhone with CarPlay.

A voice you’ll actually listen to

You spend hours alone with this voice in your helmet, so you’re allowed to be picky. Twelve languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Czech, Greek, Dutch, Polish, Russian. The announcements come from your system’s own voices, and there’s more sleeping in there than most people know: Apple, for instance, ships premium voices that sound remarkably natural and work fully offline once downloaded. Download once, pick it from the list of voices, done - the manual shows how. Plus regional flavor of your choice (en-GB, en-AU, en-IE, …). The voice speaks when it matters, and shuts up when it doesn’t.

Recording and memory

There are days when the bike stands still and the riding goes on anyway, just in your head. That’s what the archive is for. Every ride gets written down, and whatever runs past ten kilometers stays as an entry in your own book: the alpine crossing in August, the pass that ended in rain, the detour that was only supposed to be a fuel stop. The app notes breaks with start and end, so real riding time and standing-around time can be separated later. One rule above all: the data is yours. Only what you allow gets uploaded.

Privacy, built in

No account, no email, no profile: the app knows you as a randomly rolled number. Recordings stay on the device until you explicitly agree to upload them, and saying no costs nothing. Around home you can draw a privacy zone that cuts your position out while recording, not only at upload. How exactly is in Your privacy - reading time: one coffee.

Free and Pro: test ride or the whole machine

Everything you’ve read up to this point describes Pro. We don’t tack that onto every paragraph, so here it is, once.

Free is the test ride at the dealer: short, local, no obligation. The map for your area and navigation on short runs, planning and collecting as much as you like. Enough to find out whether the app suits you, not enough for the Alps. Recording is always included, and so are sharing and export as .mnav, and in a group you ride along on Free too, with no length limit. Riding along is free, on one map - it won’t get you across border passes, or past any other borders.

Pro is the whole machine. Long tours, every map, stages that chain themselves together, online routing with its eye for the character of the road, and the online search for addresses. Plus export as GPX and the planner on the computer. Opening the group and leading the others behind you: that’s Pro too.

And when Pro ends? You keep everything you have. No route vanishes, no map gets deleted. Whatever goes beyond what Free covers, the long tour, the next region, waits until you’re back on Pro.