Manual on MotoNavigator

Getting started

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Installation

MotoNavigator comes from your device’s app store. Install it, open it, ride.

Download on the App Store very soon Get it on Google Play very soon

Your first tour

Open the app — the map centres on where you are.
Drop a waypoint with the crosshair — the main button already offers whatever comes next.
Add more waypoints, drag them into order in the route panel until the line looks like a ride.
The button top right → Start navigation. The recording runs along with it, automatically.

That’s it. No wizard, no tutorial videos, no account.

Understanding waypoints

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A waypoint is a decision, not a dot. There are two of them — and each one comes with a second question attached.

Ride through, or stop

Ride through. The route picks the point up and carries straight on past it. This is how you say “over this pass, not the other one” — you are pointing the line, nothing more.

Stop. Here you get off the bike. The route splits into two stages at this point, and you can hang a waiting time on it that counts towards your arrival — fuel, hotel, the café with the view.

Garage and profiles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every tour belongs to a machine. So the garage keeps the ones you actually ride — and the app stops asking.

Your vehicles

A vehicle has a name, a kind, a range and a routing profile. Every new tour picks up the vehicle you rode last, on its own.

There are two kinds: two-wheeler and four-wheeler. Four-wheeled vehicles can hold their measurements as well — height, width, weight.

Routing profiles

The profile decides how your route gets built. Five come with the app:

Recording and data sovereignty

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A recording is the raw material of every story you tell afterwards — the archive, the memory, the proof. Two principles: it belongs to you, and it stays raw.

What gets recorded

Where you are — as often as the phone hands it over (on an iPhone roughly once a second), unsmoothed, with nothing quietly nudged onto the road afterwards. Stand 2 m off the tarmac and the dot stands 2 m off the tarmac. Honest data, no makeup.
How you move — acceleration, rotation, magnetic field. Raw, the way the sensors hand them over, not pre-chewed into a heading. 25 times a second, always. No winding the rate up and down with the mood of the road: the dull second is captured as finely as the one where it gets interesting.
Air pressure — if the phone carries a barometer, about once a second. We work the altitude out of the raw pressure ourselves instead of taking the finished figure from the operating system.

Taking a break

You pause it yourself. Nothing decides on your behalf that the ride is over — a traffic jam is not a break, and a long coffee is not a ride.

Group rides

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Riding out with friends, without the group chat catching fire at the first fuel stop. Group rides are a dedicated mode that solves exactly this — and nothing else.

Opening a group

The host sets how long it lives (today, or a number of days) and puts a QR code on screen. Whoever’s coming scans it. Done. No invitations, no phone numbers, no app-store evangelism at the kickstand.

Anonymous, with a name you pick

The group runs on an identifier of its own, and every rider gets a fresh one that lives no longer than the group does — neither has anything to do with your device ID. Want a name in the list? Pick one; it’s a label on the identifier, nothing more. Apple login, Google login? Nobody needs one. The group lives anonymously — and expires once the tour is over.

Voices and announcements

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The announcements come from your system’s own voices — MotoNavigator doesn’t ship its own speech computer, it uses the platform’s text-to-speech engine. That has an underrated upside: the voices get better with every system update, and the good ones work fully offline.

Premium voices on iOS

Apple ships voices in several quality tiers for many languages — up to premium voices that sound remarkably natural and, once downloaded, work without any network at all. Out of the box usually only the standard tier is installed; here’s how to get the better ones: