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 — plus, as extras, live traffic, closures and picking a destination directly on the map with a crosshair. 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.
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.
See also: Typical displays: Carpuride, Chigee & co. · Why some things only work in the app — and some only on the display · 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.
See also: Android Auto today — CarPlay in preparation · Why some things only work in the app — and some only on the display
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), presets, volume, skip via point.
- Android Auto only: offline vector map incl. curvy overlay, traffic and closures, 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.
See also: Android Auto today — CarPlay in preparation · How the offline maps are built