Epona — the app on the bike
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Plug the phone into CarPlay or Android Auto and the car screen used to show a map of its own. The route was a thick white line. The basemap ignored your language, POI choices and night mode. The turn arrows on Apple's card were not quite the ones on the phone. As of today the car draws the same map as the phone, and the vehicle marker behaves the way Google Maps taught everyone to expect.
Since July the rider app has been able to turn any track into a rally-style tulip roadbook — the Rally side of the Road ⇄ Rally toggle reads the corners straight off the GPX shape, no road network required. It was a document: something to scroll with a thumb at a fuel stop. Today it becomes a navigation mode.
This was the week the app stopped inferring what the motorcycle was doing and started asking it. A Bluetooth OBD-II adapter, two garage sessions, one surprise hiding in monitor mode — and by the end, live engine data on the phone and a gear indicator nobody sold us.
Two weeks ago the map stopped being flat: the routing graph learned elevation, the road score grew a climb axis, and the server could finally tell a mountain road from a merely bendy one. All of it, though, lived behind an API. This week it reaches the phone.
Plan a route with a lunch stop and a mountain pass in the middle, start navigating, and until today the app would tell you exactly one thing about time: when you'd reach the end. The intermediate stops — the whole reason the route has that shape — were invisible from the saddle.
Field captures — the photos, videos, audio notes and waypoints you record on a ride — have always had two homes: the phone that took them and the server they sync to. Since June, the Library has been smart enough to stream a capture from the server when its local copy is gone, so deleting data to free space no longer dead-ends a session. But you still couldn't say what you actually meant: "keep this, just not on my phone", or "I don't want to see this in my library any more — but don't destroy it".
Today the session view grows three storage actions that say exactly that.
This was the week we stopped trusting the navigation and started measuring it. Real rides, real device logs, and a string of bugs that had been hiding in plain sight — one of them for three months.
Losing the OSM volunteer tile servers stung. It also settled an argument we had been having with ourselves: a routing platform that cannot render its own map is renting its most visible surface from someone else, on someone else's schedule.
This week we stopped renting.
Riders already carry an action camera. Until now it was a separate device with its own app, its own battery anxiety and its own timeline that never quite lined up with the ride.
Not any more.
Epona is the Gaulish goddess of horses and riders — the one deity the Roman cavalry adopted wholesale and carried across the empire. Protector of anyone on the move.
It seemed like the right name for the thing in your tank bag.