The Bike Companion is a freely customizable Trip Computer for bicycles. It is designed to make your daily bike rides more fun (be it training, be it biking to your office and back).
Why is it special? For example,
- it keeps track of your total stats like distance, highest speed ever, total time spent biking
- for some reason I personally find it rewarding to know that since I started regularly biking with it, I've saved 95 kg of carbon dioxide by using bike instead of car
- it shows pop-ups when you achieve something special, like a big shock or your if you've gained the height of the empire state building on a trip.
- you can bike against past trips on the same track; the Bike companion will constantly show you how well you're doing (how many meters / yards are you ahead or behind?)
- and of course it contains a lot of information you might want to see while biking.
Currently it features over 30 different pieces of information that you can place freely on a grid on your phone's screen. There are the basics like current speed, fastest speed on this trip or ever, or current altitude / altitude gained on this trip or ever, and there are more exotic ones like the number of shocks you had to endure on your trip, or the amount of carbon dioxide you've saved by using the bike so far.
If you wish, you can also let a part of the display cycle between multiple bits of information, showing each for one second.
You can choose if you want to get frequent GPS updates (at the expense of battery life) or if you only want to receive a new GPS update every 30 seconds and have your battery last longer until the next charge.
Information can be displayed as text, as a horizontal bar (if that makes sense), or as a graph showing the values of the last few minutes (if that makes sense). You can freely choose how to display information.
Whenever you achieve something special (your first kg of CO2 saved, the first 100 km biked), the Bike Companion will inform you in a pop-up about that. You can take a look at details on all your past achievements whenever you want.
Explanation of Permissions the app needs:
* internet access: needed for a feature that gives you more information on a recorded trip: it shows you up to four cities you've been through. For this, unfortunately, the app needs a call to a google service.
* write external storage: needed only for the new mail feature, attaching a GPX file with your trip coordinates to a mail. The GPX file is written to a temporary location which needs this permission.
* wake lock: so that the display doesn't go dark while you're biking
* access location / fine location: so that the app gets GPS data
