The Bike Companion

The ultimate tool for boring regular bike trips.

The Bike Companion is the ultimate tool to make your boring regular biking more challenging and more fun.

To use it, mount your phone to your bike (recommended: use an old Android phone you own - this app runs on all Androids since Android 1.6), start The Bike Companion, configure it to show what you're interested in, and bike, while keeping The Bike Companion running.

As the idea of The Bike Companion is to make your ride nicer, it doesn't support running in the background.

Features:

Configurable Trip Computer:

The Bike Companion will then give you a grid display that can show a good number of data of over 50 bits of information (from basic trip computer stuff like trip time or average speed to exotic stuff like calories burned on trip). each information can be shown as text, bar, graph.

Fun Achievement System:

Whenever you reach a certain threshold you will receive a pop-up message about your achievement (e.g. "faster than a lion" or "burned enough calories on this trip to eat a donut" or "overall climbed the height of Mount Everest").

Ghost Races:

You know timed races in racing games? Where you typically compete against a "ghost" that shows your previously best lap? Bike Companion lets you do the same with your daily bike trips. As a preparation you have to bike one of your regular trips and name it. In any later trip you can choose to compete against a previous trip. You'll regularly get information on how well you do compared to the "ghost".

Additionally, The Bike Companion analyzes the Ghost trip and automatically finds good spots (e.g. strong turns) at which it sets intermediates. You can view distance and time to the next intermediate and speed required to make it on par with the ghost.

Bike Shocks:

You can configure Bike Companion to record all the major shocks that your phone (and your body) has to endure while you are biking, providing info like number and strength of shocks, longest time without major shock, and pop-ups like "over 2 g shock!" or "2 minutes without major shock".

Bike Shock can be combined with Ghost Races so you can try to ride more smoothly than the ghost (or rougher).

Your Environment Impact:

Bike Companion provides information on how much carbon dioxide emissions you save by biking compared to driving your car. Enter your car's CO2 emissions in the preferences and see what you save, incl. achievements like "saved the weight of a rat in CO2 emissions".

Day Statistics

The Bike Companion keeps track of your biking, saving distance covered, time biked, average speed for every day. You can then select any time range and e.g. get an overview of your biking in the last quarter.

This is the free version of The Bike Companion. By purchasing The Bike Companion Pro Key on Google Play, you unlock Bike Companion pro with the latest features. Once in a while, pro features make it into the free version, but this typically takes months, so why not spend a buck to upgrade and support development of The Bike Companion?

Here is a list of the current "pro only" features:

- day statistics include grand totals: you can e.g. find out how much you've biked this year compared to last year.

- color coded text - e.g. if you are behind the ghost, the respective info is marked subtly red. If you're ahead, it's marked slightly green.

- wind support: on startup, The Bike Companion gets the current weather conditions. While you bike, you can see e.g. how much tail/head wind you face.

- enhanced Bike Shock: the pro version checks for shocks much more often than the free version, giving you more accurate shock info.

- sorted trip list: When naming a track, the list of tracks that you've named is sorted alphabetically.

What's New in the Latest Version 1.21

- much better, finely tuned bike shock infos. With the new settings there should now be a good bike shock setting for everybody from full suspension to hard racing bikes.
- gave up on using the orientation sensor for slope detection and use GPS for this now. Not perfect but much better.
- Infos for total shock sum and shock count now are formatted nicer.