Corners, lean, pace, the road, the weather that day: it all wants to be told. But no app speaks that language today.

Strava doesn’t accept motorcycles. Moto apps either drop the recording, or draw the route and forget the community, or lock the most needed safety features behind a subscription. So riders bounce between three apps and never feel at home in any of them.

A screen-by-screen pain and gain benchmark of Strava, REVER, Calimoto and EatSleepRide.

I coded what riders wrote in App Store and Google Play reviews, on Reddit and motorcycle forums, and in independent reviews, in August 2026. I tagged every finding with the app, the screen, pain or gain, and a category, and used the same screen taxonomy for all four apps from onboarding to paywall, so I could compare them side by side. Alongside the desk research I talked to riders I know, and I ride myself.

I treated every complaint from the research as a problem to design out, not a feature to bolt on.

Three pains that came up again and again in the benchmark, paraphrased from riders’ reviews, and how I designed each one out. Safety, sharing and community are covered in the decisions above.

My 42-screen prototype was quick to make and hard to build: it used 26 different corner radii and 47 font sizes.

I cut it down to one token ladder: 10 radii, 11 type steps, a 44 pt minimum hit area and two themes, dark and light. I made ride controls bigger: Break and Finish use the 52 pt button, and Finish is hold-to-confirm, so a gloved tap can’t end a ride by accident. I gave the Flutter theme files the same names, so a token in Figma is the same token in code. Shared components and new screens take their colour, radius and spacing from tokens; if a value is missing, I add a token first, and I’m moving the remaining hard-coded values in older screens over to tokens. So I make a design change once and it lands in Figma and the app together.

Before submitting, with no users yet, I tested it two ways: on my own motorcycle, on several real rides, and with a structured review alongside my release checklist.

I tested recording on my own motorcycle over several rides, because a locked screen, a dead zone or a long stop only shows up on a real road. For the review I went through the code and the store listing against Apple’s and Google’s store policies and my release checklist, screen by screen, as a rider would use it. It isn’t user research; that starts with the first riders. I caught six release blockers this way:

1. 01The app targeted iPad with no tablet layout. 1.0 ships iPhone-only.
2. 02The store text promised a Ride Buddy web page that wasn’t live yet.
3. 03The privacy and terms pages had to be live before review.
4. 04An unsigned Paid Apps Agreement would have shown an empty paywall.
5. 05Android used an outdated Play Billing library.
6. 06Android asked for background location the recording service didn’t need.