Automatic vehicle telemetry for iPhone
Your car's own flight recorder.
Plug an OBD adapter into the port under your dashboard. Set OBDTrip up once. From then on every journey records itself — engine, road and route — and quietly builds years of history about how your car is really doing.
How it works
Set it up once. Then forget it exists.
There is no Start button, no trip to name, no dashboard to configure before you drive. You get in the car; the recording has already begun.
It knows the car by its VIN
Each vehicle gets its own record — the readings it supports, what it usually does, and what it did today. Two cars, two histories, no set-up in between.
It learns what your car answers
Nothing is assumed. OBDTrip asks your engine what it can report, remembers the answer, and only ever requests readings it knows will come back.
It is careful with your battery
Location is sampled at the coarsest setting a useful route allows, polling slows when nothing is changing, and recording stops when you and the car part company.
It reads, and clears only when you ask
OBDTrip never sends a command to an actuator, never touches your coding, never writes to your ECU. It listens. The one thing it will change is the fault codes it has read, and only when you ask it to, after telling you what clearing them does.
Every drive, kept
A route, a graph and the bits that mattered.
A finished trip is more than a line on a map. OBDTrip marks the peaks — your fastest moment, the hardest braking, the point the oil finally came up to temperature — and puts them where you can see them against the road you were on.
- ▸ Route reconstructed from efficient location sampling
- ▸ Full-resolution graphs of every signal your car reports
- ▸ Events pinned to the exact second and place they happened
- ▸ Years of drives, stored compactly and searchable
While you drive
On the dash, on the Lock Screen, or nowhere at all.
Choose the readings you want and where they appear: a CarPlay dashboard card, a Live Activity on the Lock Screen, the Dynamic Island, or nothing whatsoever. A passive user should never see the app; an enthusiast should be able to fill the screen with it.
Over months, not minutes
It tells you when something has changed.
A single reading means almost nothing. A hundred drives means a great deal. OBDTrip watches how your car's own normal shifts over time and speaks up when a trend is worth knowing about — long before it becomes a warning light.
- ▸ Warm-up behaviour compared against your car's own history
- ▸ Fault codes recorded with the conditions around them
- ▸ Quiet by default: only significant changes are surfaced
Privacy
Your driving is nobody else's business.
Where you went, when you went there and what your engine was doing is exactly the kind of record that should not be sitting on somebody else's server. So it isn't. OBDTrip processes everything on your iPhone and syncs between your own devices through your private iCloud — the same place your photos live, which we cannot read either.
Stays on your devices
- ◆ Your vehicle identification number
- ◆ Every route you have driven
- ◆ Exact times and dates of your journeys
- ◆ Your full second-by-second recording, always
- ◆ Raw engine readings, second by second
- ◆ Photos and names you give your vehicles
- ◆ How you drive — acceleration, braking, cornering
Never sent anywhere
- ◆ No account, no email address, no password
- ◆ No location — not once, not coarsened, not ever
- ◆ No VIN, registration or any vehicle identifier
- ◆ No routes, and no journey time finer than the hour
- ◆ No advertising or analytics trackers of any kind
- ◆ No data sold, shared or brokered. There is no second party.
So what does reach your server?
Two things, and you control both. Essential diagnostics are on unless you turn them off: that the app was opened, that a drive happened, roughly how much is stored on your phone, and what went wrong when something did. It is how a crash on your phone becomes a fix in the next release, and there is nothing in it that describes your vehicle or you.
Extended telemetry is off unless you turn it on, and it is what makes a real comparison possible — "is this coolant range normal for an engine like mine?". It sends detailed readings from your vehicle and unlocks the extended insights in return. You choose how long it stays on: a day, a week, a month, or until you turn it off. A period you choose ends by itself.
At either level, what travels is tagged with a coarse group like this engine family, this model-year band. Your phone works out that group locally; the server never receives the VIN it came from. Aggregates are only released once enough separate vehicles sit behind them, so no figure can be traced back to one car. Turning extended telemetry off stops collection and stops the extended insights — it does not unmix readings already averaged with thousands of others, and we would rather say so here than bury it. The full detail is in the privacy policy.
Questions
The things people ask first.
What do I need to buy?
A Bluetooth OBD-II adapter. OBDTrip is developed and tested against the Vgate iCar Pro BLE 4.0, and works with other Bluetooth Low Energy adapters that speak the usual ELM327-style command set. Classic Bluetooth adapters and Wi-Fi adapters are not supported — iOS does not let an app reach them the way automatic background recording requires.
Will it flatten my car's battery?
The adapter draws power from the OBD port whenever it is plugged in, which is a consideration on any adapter, not just with this app. OBDTrip itself stops requesting data as soon as the engine stops answering, and disconnects cleanly when you leave. If you park a car for weeks at a time, unplug the adapter — that is good practice regardless.
Can it clear a fault code for me?
Yes, when you ask. Once a fault has been fixed, Clear fault codes on the Fault Codes screen turns the check engine light off. OBDTrip tells you first what that does: it also erases the freeze-frame data a garage would use and resets the emissions readiness monitors, so it is best done after a repair, not instead of one. A fault that is still there comes straight back, and the clear is kept in the car's fault history. Coding, actuator tests and anything else that writes to a vehicle remain outside what this app does.
What happens if I lose signal, or my phone is off?
Nothing is lost. Recording does not depend on the internet at any point — the phone talks to the adapter directly and stores everything locally. Syncing to your other devices, and the optional fleet comparison, simply happen later when there is a connection again.
Do I need to open the app to start a trip?
No. iOS wakes OBDTrip when your adapter comes back into range, even if the app has not been opened for weeks. The one exception is Apple's own rule: if you force-quit an app by swiping it away, iOS will not relaunch it for Bluetooth until you next open it yourself.
Where is my data if I delete the app?
Gone from the device, and removable from iCloud in the same step. There is no server-side copy of your trips to ask us to delete, because we never had one — no routes, no journey times, nothing carrying your vehicle's identity. What our server holds is group averages across many vehicles, which describe a population rather than a car and have nothing in them to remove.
Install once. Configure once. Then drive.
OBDTrip is built for the long run — the quiet accumulation of a real record of your car, kept somewhere you actually control.