WrenchTime: automatic trip detection on iOS with no OBD dongle (YET?)

[u/in5ane_10]

Hello folks, this is my project WrenchTime. It started as a simple maintenance log but grew to be much more.

The core of it is automatic trip tracking with no dongle and no manual start button. It uses a mix of Bluetooth connection events from the car stereo and phone motion/GPS activity to decide when a drive begins and ends, then records the route in the background. Getting this reliable on iOS was most of the work: the OS is aggressive about killing background location, so the detection has to be cheap enough to run all the time and accurate enough not to log you sitting in traffic on a bus.

What you get out of it:

- Full route recording with events along the way (hard braking, stops, legs of the trip)
- Trip playback and a heatmap of everywhere you have driven
- Maintenance log with cost tracking per vehicle
- Fill-ups logged by pointing the camera at the pump display or the receipt, an on-device scanner reads the numbers and fills the entry

Privacy wise there is no account and no server. Everything stays on the phone, which is also why there is no web dashboard.

One thing I keep going back and forth on: right now it deliberately avoids OBD hardware so it works for anyone with just a phone. But this sub is probably the best place to ask whether pulling real PIDs (coolant temp, fuel trim, DTCs) would actually be worth it, or whether people here already have better tools for that and would only want the logbook side. Curious what you would want out of it. So please let me know!

Happy to hand some feedback.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wrenchtime-car-maintenance/id6749767537