📡 How Automatic Tracking Works

AutoDrive uses your device’s built-in motion classifier to detect when you are driving. On iOS this is Core Motion (the same system that powers iOS step counting and workout detection); on Android it’s Google Play Services activity recognition. Both report when the system has classified your movement as automotive — faster and more reliable than GPS speed alone, and it works the moment the car starts moving rather than waiting for you to hit a particular speed. Short bursts of running or cycling are reported as a different activity class and don’t trigger a drive.

On Android, detection runs through two parallel wake paths so a single failure never causes a missed drive:

• Activity recognition — the primary trigger. Google Play Services classifies your movement as IN_VEHICLE and wakes AutoDrive, even when the app is fully closed. This is the most battery-efficient path but can lag by a few minutes on short trips.
• Low-power location fallback — a passive background listener that wakes AutoDrive whenever any app’s location request produces a driving-speed fix. This catches short, highway-only, or quick-start drives that activity recognition can miss.

Once a drive is detected, the app records your GPS coordinates approximately every 3 seconds. These points form the path of your trip and are encoded as a compact polyline for efficient storage and fast map rendering.

The drive ends automatically when the app senses you have been stationary for about 1 minute (the threshold is configurable from 1 to 5 minutes in Settings). After 15 seconds of being idle, the status pill flips to "Finalizing drive…" as a heads-up that the trip is wrapping up — if you start moving again before the timer expires, the drive picks back up and the same recording continues. Once the timer fires, the trip is finalized: distance is calculated, fuel cost is looked up, the route is simplified to remove redundant points, and the drive is saved locally and pushed to the server in one round-trip.

All of this happens in the background with no interaction required. You can review any recorded drive by tapping it in the Drives tab to see the route on a map along with distance, duration, and estimated fuel cost.