Android Auto & Apple CarPlay

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Android Auto today — CarPlay in preparation

The Android version of TDM ships with full Android Auto support: map with route, track and your position, manoeuvre card with voice guidance, start/stop/pause, zoom, day/night, a complete menu (“Where to?” with search, POI categories, home/work, recent destinations), the route and track library, presets, volume, language switching, the distance to every selectable destination — which the lists are also sorted by — plus an arrow for “lies ahead” and a U-turn symbol for “already passed”, an info page with version, update check, the loaded route including length and share code, sending diagnostics and a video capture of the map surface — plus, as extras, live traffic, closures and picking a destination directly on the map with a crosshair; live traffic and closures require a Pro license. One principle always applies: the app runs on the phone; the car or handlebar display is a screen and control surface, while routing, off-route logic and announcements are computed by your phone.

Stopped a route? It stays on the car display and can be restarted or simulated from there. And the last row of “Recent destinations” clears the list — tap it twice.

Only pinned POIs reach the car screen: as markers on the car map and as the “My places” list under “Where to?”. A POI is pinned when its eye in the POI list is open. One import easily brings thousands of points, but the car screen shows only a few rows - so you pick the handful that belongs to the ride (POIs chapter). While CarPlay approval is pending, the first-start assistant on the iPhone says so and links to the overview in the TD portal.

Apple CarPlay is already fully built into TDM — map, turn-by-turn manoeuvres, menu and destination search. However, Apple requires a manual approval of every CarPlay navigation app. As soon as that approval is granted, CarPlay will be enabled with an update.

Round trip suggestions on Android Auto

With KAKIMOTO round trips switched on, their destination suggestions also appear on Android Auto: as an overlay above the map with “Let's go!” and “Later”, and as a voice announcement on top of that. If a head unit does not display overlays, a short message appears instead, plus a Round trip tile in the main menu. If the region's offline map is missing, the car screen says so once per ride — but only as long as the map on the phone has not been opened since the app started. All of this works even while the phone sits locked in your pocket: location stays active in the background as long as a car screen is connected and the round trips switch is on. Everything else is in the chapter “KAKIMOTO round trips”, section “Round trips on Android Auto”.

Typical displays: Carpuride, Chigee & co.

Besides built-in car head units there is a whole family of aftermarket motorcycle displays that receive Android Auto and Apple CarPlay wirelessly: Carpuride, Chigee (e.g. the AIO-5), RiderNav, MotoRide and many more. They are waterproof, sunlight-readable and come with handlebar mounts; some add extras such as a dashcam or tyre-pressure monitoring. Your phone stays safely in your pocket and beams the TDM interface onto the display.

Android Auto and CarPlay follow the same idea — the app runs on the phone, the display shows a ride-friendly interface — but differ in the details: Android Auto lets TDM draw its own map (including the offline vector map and the curvy-roads overlay), while CarPlay renders the map through Apple's map framework. Both prescribe menus, lists and buttons as fixed templates — more on that in the next section.

Simplified mode: the phone stays in your pocket

If you use TDM mostly on the car screen, you do not need the full phone interface with its maps, lists and settings pages while you are out. That is what the simplified mode is for — the switch calls it “Car-first start page”.

What changes: the app no longer starts with the map but with a small page. At the very top you see whether the car screen is connected, and below it sit four tiles: account, settings, help and “All features”. There is nothing more — and nothing more is needed while map, destination and voice guidance run on the car display anyway.

What does NOT change: on the car screen itself everything appears exactly as before — the same menu, the same map, the same destinations. The simplified mode is a start preference, not a restriction: not a single feature is locked, and “All features” opens the complete app with one tap.

Switching it on and off: TDM asks about it during first-time setup — but only if you picked car, motorcycle or motorhome there, and only on phones that can drive a car screen. Later you can change it any time under Settings > System > Car-first start page; the same place offers “Run first-time setup again” if you would like to see both questions once more.

Android Auto and Apple CarPlay: today the mode takes effect with Android Auto. On the iPhone the assistant already asks about Apple CarPlay because CarPlay support is fully built in; it becomes usable as soon as Apple grants the approval for the app — see “Android Auto today — CarPlay in preparation”.

Library: start, simulate — or just show

Behind the “Tracks” and “Routes” tiles sits the library of the car screen: the recordings and planned routes stored on the phone and, if you are signed in, your tours from the TD cloud. Pick an entry and three rows are offered:

Start navigation — the tour is loaded and the guidance begins.
Simulate — the same ride, but virtual (see “Simulation on the car screen”).
Show — the tour is loaded and drawn on the map without anything being started; the second line says so explicitly: “View only - nothing is started”.

What “Show” is good for: you want to see where a tour actually leads before setting off — especially with a cloud route that has to be downloaded first. TDM switches on the overview for this and shows the whole line from start to finish instead of just the section around your position. If you like it, you start it with the start button that is ready afterwards; if you do not, you look at the next one. “Show” needs neither location nor background positioning — nothing is being driven, after all.

While a navigation or simulation is running, “Show” is blocked and reports “End the ride first”: the new tour would have to take the running one off the map, and robbing a rider of the guidance mid-ride just because they wanted to look something up would be the worse surprise.

Simulation on the car screen: what it drives and how fast

The “Simulation” tile in the car menu drives a tour virtually — with map, manoeuvre card, lane hints and voice guidance, exactly like a real ride. It knows three cases:

Something is loaded: the loaded route or track is driven; the second line of the tile says “this route”.
Navigation is running: the running navigation turns into a simulation — same route, but now the computer drives.
Nothing is loaded: the tile says “no destination”, and tapping it brings up the hint “Set a destination or load a route or track”. The app no longer picks a demo destination of its own — it used to claim it was heading for a destination about 6 km away, and visibly nothing happened.

For the same reason the start and simulation buttons on the map screen only appear when something is loaded: without a destination there would be nothing to drive, and a button without effect is worse at the handlebar than no button at all. The menu tile, by contrast, stays visible at all times, so that the simulation can be found even by someone who has just opened the app for the first time.

The speed is set on the car screen under “Speed / Simulation”: level 1 is real time, above that the fast-forward begins, up to 800 km/h. Since September 2026 that level also applies when the app runs through the car screen alone — simplified mode, phone locked in your pocket. Before that only the phone interface read the setting; with no phone interface running, the simulation stubbornly drove at 80 km/h and the level you had chosen stayed without effect. One limitation comes with it: in simplified mode — when the app runs through the car screen alone — level 1 drives at a constant 50 km/h; no speed limit is looked up there. The real-time level follows the signs along the road only while the map on the phone is running. You can change the level in the middle of a drive: it is picked up within a few seconds, and the new speed is accelerated to rather than jumped to.

Voice guidance: at a leisurely pace the simulation pauses briefly for every announcement so that instruction and position match. From about 130 km/h upwards it keeps rolling while the instructions are spoken — whoever chooses fast-forward wants to see the route, not stand still for up to 15 seconds at every announcement.

The simulation is also the mode Google requires for reviewing a navigation app in the Play Store; that is why the tile can be found in the menu regardless of any switch.

Sending diagnostics — and what happens to the data afterwards

If something goes wrong on a ride, the log of exactly that ride is what helps the developer. The “Diagnostics” tile in the car menu sends it straight from the car screen to the TD portal — without you having to fish the phone out of your jacket and unlock it. An upload can take minutes; for as long as it does, the car screen keeps showing where it stands (“Ride 2 of 5 · Sending … 47 %”).

After sending, the transferred data is deleted from the device — precisely the data whose arrival the server confirmed: the folders of the individual rides, the loose files sent along, and the uploaded excerpt of the running log. If the transfer breaks off after the third ride, exactly those three are gone; everything else stays and goes along next time. The session currently running is never touched. At the end the car screen reports how many rides were sent and deleted — the phone says the same in its closing dialog.

The tile only appears when logging is switched on (Settings > Debug mode); otherwise there would almost never be anything to send, and a button without effect is worse at the wheel than a missing tile. Sending uses the phone's internet connection; in the portal the data sits under TDM-Debug.

Why some things only work in the app — and some only on the display

Android Auto and CarPlay are governed by strict rules from Google and Apple: navigation apps must be certified and may not draw a free interface — they can only fill predefined templates (navigation view, lists, search) with a limited number of buttons, capped lists and no free text input while driving. That explains the differences:

Only in the app: planning and editing routes (waypoints, via/shaping), all settings, downloading offline maps, cloud login, POI import, pass filter, ReLive.
On both displays: map with route/track, manoeuvres + voice + ETA, start/stop/pause, zoom, day/night, recenter, destination search and POI categories, library (start/simulate/show), presets, volume, language, skip via point.
Android Auto only: offline vector map incl. curvy overlay, traffic and closures (both Pro only), picking a destination with the map crosshair, riding on with the phone locked.
Map material: on the phone TDM renders vector maps with relief and 3D; the displays show raster maps — your chosen style is mapped to the closest raster style, and there is no relief or 3D there.
Prerequisites: Android Auto only accepts apps installed through the Play Store; CarPlay requires the navigation approval granted by Apple.