Odometer, trips and business
Track drives automatically
Pro + Automatic trackingWhat’s in Pro + Automatic tracking →
Settings → Trips → Automatic tracking. OdoWorks notices each drive and records it with the app closed. Sort it as Business or Personal from the notification, or later in Detected drives; each one sorted goes into your log as a trip.
How it works
The phone’s motion sensors tell when you’re in a vehicle; the GPS then records the drive and stops a few minutes after you park, so a light or a drive-through stays in the same drive.
On the lock screen you can pick Business or Personal when you’re stopped and confirm after you park, or sort the drive then.
The sensors take half a minute to a minute and a half of driving to say you’re in a vehicle, so the drive is measured back to where you parked and starts when you left there; Driving now and its notification count from there too.
How far back: up to 1.2 mi, or on a fast road as far as the car went at its speed in three minutes, up to 3.1 mi.
A drive shows, in Driving now and its notification, once the sensors say a vehicle and the phone moves faster than a walk, or at a car’s speed (11 mph). The sensors’ word alone, standing or walking, isn’t enough.
One that shows but never reaches a car’s speed in two minutes, while you’re on foot or within about 100 yards, goes back to waiting quietly, its notification gone. Driving now and Detected drives say how each drive started: the sensors, a car’s speed, your car’s connection or Start a drive.
What the phone needs
Location “All the time” with Use precise location on (approximate leaves every drive out), motion (physical activity) and notifications; the app explains first, then the phone asks. Without “All the time”, drives with the app closed aren’t recorded, and the page says so with Open location settings.
Some phones pause apps to save battery: the page says so, with Open OdoWorks’s settings (Battery, then Unrestricted). A Samsung, and some other phones, also put apps to sleep with their own battery saver: the page offers Open the battery saver, where you let OdoWorks run (on a Samsung, Never sleeping apps).
How it compares with the odometer
Detected drives → How it’s doing puts each car’s drives between two odometer readings (a fill-up’s, or a reading’s) against what the odometer says, for the first weeks of trying it.
Your location
The drives stay on this phone. Only each drive’s start and end spots (and, for a drive across a border, a few spots along the way) go to your phone’s own maps service, for the addresses, and while Driving now’s map is open, OpenFreeMap gets the area around the car to draw its streets.
While tracking runs, the phone shows Recording a drive (Watching for a drive, with Start on the walk to the car on). Turning it off stops it, and the drives found stay to sort; Erase everything deletes them and turns it off.