Rods — Corner & Road Alerts

Version 1.7.0 What's New - Free Roam: just start driving any road and get live rally pace notes instantly, no route planning needed. - Import routes: bring in a route from a GPX file, a Google Maps link, or by sharing straight to Rods. Improvements - Sharper corner detection. Long gentle sweeping bends are now detected and no longer broken into repeated callouts. - Clearer route preview with start, end and checkpoint pins, and the map always fits the whole route. - Navigate-to-start keeps your original route and offers to save the combined drive as a copy. - Smoother combined callouts, like "opens" and "tightens" spoken as one. - Import warns you when the routed roads differ from your imported track. Bug Fixes - Drives now end automatically at the finish, and the "to finish" callout no longer repeats. - The corner distance callout no longer fires right on top of the corner. - Pace notes now keep playing when your phone is locked. - Fixed a freeze when returning to the app on Android. - Fixed a silent "Acquiring GPS" hang on launch. - More reliable voice-pack downloads on Android.

Version 1.7.1 Improvements - Smoother car animation in the demo, with jitter fixed on long routes. - Cleaner fade on your driven trail as you drive. Bug Fixes - Fixed repeated map-data re-downloads when a region's data file was corrupted. - The create-route map no longer asks for location permission before you start. - (iOS) The onboarding demo now mutes instantly when you turn the voice off.

Version 1.7.11 Improvements - Reduced battery use and device heating during drives. Bug Fixes - Fixed the app occasionally freezing while granting or checking location permission. - Fixed Resume Drive sometimes failing to reopen your route. - Fixed rare GPS glitches that could jump your position to the wrong spot. - Fixed pace notes occasionally stalling for a few seconds mid-drive after the route recalculates. - Fixed driving a saved route that reroutes silently overwriting or duplicating it — Rods now asks whether to update the route or save a new copy. - Fixed saved Free Roam drives sometimes missing their pace notes. - More reliable rerouting in dense, complex areas. If you leave the route in a city center or near stacked highways, Rods now finds you a fresh line instead of occasionally giving up. - Fixed downloaded voice packs sometimes being cleared by the phone's storage cleanup or backup, which could make callouts go silent days after they were working. - Fixed voice callouts going silent when "Use Original Voice" was on but that voice pack hadn't finished downloading. - Fixed the app freezing while building very long routes. - Fixed road surface wrongly showing "100% unpaved" or "no data" on shorter routes. - Fixed the route-processing screen showing kilometers for drivers set to miles. - Fixed importing GPX route files shared from Files, iCloud Drive, or AirDrop, which sometimes failed with a "no permission" or "file not found" error. - Fixed Free Roam off-route rerouting — Rods now notices you've left the route right away instead of leaving you stranded. - Fixed Free Roam routes snapping onto bridges and overpasses that cross over your road. - Fixed visual glitches on saved Free Roam routes (corner kinks and doubled corner lines).

Version 1.7.12 Improvements - Improved support for larger text — Rods now follows your device's Bigger Text accessibility setting across the app without overlapping or cut-off text.

Version 1.7.13 What's New - The Pause button is now Mute — silence the voice anytime without stopping your drive.

What's New - Rods now calls out roundabouts on your route and tells you which exit to take. - Added motorcycle support — choose Car or Motorcycle when you set up Rods, with a new bike for your garage. Improvements - Free Roam now catches more sharp, single-point corners it used to miss. Bug Fixes - Fixed some subscribers being incorrectly shown as not subscribed and locked out of their saved routes. - Fixed the route preview occasionally getting stuck on the loading screen. - Fixed the app freezing while recalculating after a reroute. - Fixed search results overlapping the top of the screen when creating a route. - Android: fixed background GPS being shut down by aggressive battery savers on some phones — drives now recover automatically.

Bug Fixes - Fixed the first corner callout sometimes arriving late on iPhone.

Version 1.7.2 Improvements - Better Google Maps link import — now handles country domains (like google.de), links pasted inside a message, and multi-stop links. - Smoother map on very long routes — fixed lag and a cut-off route line while driving and in the route preview. Bug Fixes - Fixed your music or podcast volume briefly dropping when a drive begins. - Fixed a rare Home screen crash linked to the 3D car preview.

Version 1.7.3 What's New - Import a route straight from a Waze share link. - Spoken alert when you drift off-route with weak GPS, so you're never left in silence. Improvements - Voice packs now upgrade automatically when an improved pack is released. - Smoother Free Roam with less lag on long drives. - Pace notes stay better aligned with your position between GPS updates. Bug Fixes - Fixed Free Roam callouts occasionally going silent or arriving late. - Fixed Free Roam repeating roundabout calls, and false roundabout calls under tunnels. - Fixed Free Roam repeating the same speed-bump callout. - Fixed "Caution, roundabout" going silent on older voice packs. - Free Roam now saves your full drive even when the trace is trimmed. - Free Roam saved routes now show speed bumps and surfaces in preview. - Fixed pace notes freezing on long drives after a GPS dropout. - Fixed a freeze on the drive screen caused by a display loop. - Fixed a crash when opening Create Route. - Fixed the car icon facing the wrong way or vanishing through corners. - Fixed Bluetooth callouts fading in at the start of every prompt. - (iOS) Fixed callouts going silent after a mid-drive audio glitch. - (iOS) Fixed callouts going silent after a phone call or Siri interruption mid-drive. - (Android) Fixed an audio-service crash when returning to the app mid-drive.

Version 1.7.4 Improvements - Create Route now snaps your pins to the correct nearby road. - Faster, smoother rating prompt. Bug Fixes - Fixed routes occasionally drawing a straight line instead of following the road. - Fixed voice pack downloads that could get stuck or keep restarting. - Fixed callouts staying silent even when the voice pack was ready. - Fixed occasional errors importing routes from Google Maps links. - Fixed callouts arriving late on newer phones. - Fixed an app freeze that could happen under memory pressure. - Fixed crashes on newer devices and while loading map data.

Version 1.7.5 Bug Fixes - Fixed pace-note callouts going silent mid-drive at low speeds when GPS accuracy drops. - Fixed routes you build before creating an account not appearing in your saved Routes. - Fixed route details briefly disappearing while a long route loads.

Version 1.7.7 Improvements - Free Roam now recalculates the road ahead about 3x faster when you leave the planned route. - Your Free Roam driven trail now stays on the map for the whole session, colored by corner difficulty. - Morning and evening Rods messages on the Home screen now appear at the right time of day. Bug Fixes - Fixed Free Roam gradually slowing down and overheating the phone on longer sessions, which could make the car icon and route line vanish. - Fixed drives going silent for the rest of the session after a route recalculation hiccup. - Fixed the Free Roam car icon jittering back and forth along the road. - Restored the settings button on the Free Roam drive screen. - Callouts are no longer dropped when the audio system is briefly busy — Rods now retries. - Callouts now recover and play when Siri or another app briefly holds audio while Rods is in the background.

What's New - See your live speed and the road's posted speed limit right on the drive screen. - Free Roam now works fully offline — get corner callouts even with no signal. - New "British" units — distances in metres and miles, with speed in mph. - Route preview now shows roundabouts, chicanes, islands and narrowings on the map. Improvements - Callouts now play back-to-back with tighter timing through dense corner sequences. - Cleaner map for backroad driving — quieter labels, with road and town names kept. - Drive map and callout cards now show the same hazard icons as the route preview. - Free Roam handles dual-carriageways and dead-end roads more reliably. Bug Fixes - Fixed roundabouts occasionally not being called out, or announcing the wrong exit. - Fixed Free Roam duplicating or re-announcing corners on out-and-back drives. - Fixed Free Roam callouts stalling when the route buffer got stuck. - Fixed callouts going silent when a voice pack had a problem. - Fixed the import button getting stuck on the loading screen. - Fixed the car marker occasionally jumping or spinning during a drive. - Fixed the vehicle picker card shifting when selected.

General fixes and behind-the-scenes improvements.

What's New - Edit saved routes by dragging the start and end points, with undo and redo. Bug Fixes - Fixed callouts stopping mid-drive when another app (like Waze) was in front. - Fixed a rare crash while driving or using Free Roam. - Fixed Free Roam occasionally not generating a route. - Fixed Free Roam saved drives getting cut short. - Fixed the Free Roam summary not showing speed cameras and bridges. - Fixed voice pack downloads stalling or freezing the app, now with reliable resume. - Fixed the speed limit sometimes disappearing on twisty roads. - Fixed closely-spaced roundabouts where only the first was called out.

Bug Fixes - Fixed email sign-in links sometimes failing with a false "link expired" error or dropping you back to the login screen. - Fixed the app occasionally getting stuck on a loading spinner right after a successful sign-in. - Fixed the drive map going blank on a weak or patchy mobile signal — it now recovers on its own with a brief notice. - Fixed some GPX route files failing to import — rejected as invalid, or doubled when the file contained both a track and a route. - Fixed a single roundabout occasionally being announced twice. - Fixed long routes taking a long time to appear in the route preview — they now load much faster.

General improvements and bug fixes.

Improvements - Sharper pace notes on long sweeping bends. A single continuous curve is now called once instead of being split into repeated callouts, including in route preview. Bug Fixes - Fixed sharp ~90° junctions sometimes being announced by number instead of "square", and flowing corners being wrongly called "square".

What's New - New setting to hide the low-GPS-signal warning banner during drives. Improvements - Improved corner detection on linked bends — compound and tighter corners that flow together are now called as one, instead of being split into repeated callouts. Bug Fixes - Fixed two clearly separate corners sometimes being merged into a single callout. - Fixed the first corners right after a reroute sometimes missing their pace notes. - Fixed the map not following your car at the start of a Free Roam session.

Bug Fixes - Fixed Free Roam and the speed-limit display not working correctly when driving near a state or region border. - Fixed roads passing under a bridge being announced as "over bridge" — now correctly called "under bridge".