Every mile counts now, even with your phone in your pocket

Most practice drives happen with the phone locked in a cup holder or tucked in a pocket, which is exactly where it should be. Until now, that was also where DriveMint's mileage came up short. Distance was only measured reliably while the app was on screen. Lock the phone or switch apps and the odometer lost track, and on Android the app bridged those gaps with a straight line between two points, so a winding route could log far fewer miles than you really drove.

The latest version replaces all of that with a native, on-device location engine. It keeps measuring for the whole drive, and the same engine now decides when a drive has paused and when it's really over.

Distance now comes from a native odometer that runs underneath the app instead of inside it. It filters out jumpy GPS fixes and adds up the road you actually covered, and it keeps going when:

• the screen is off and the phone is locked
• you've switched to maps, music or another app
• on Android, the app has been swiped away entirely (a small notification shows that the drive is still recording)

When you open DriveMint again, the mileage is already there. Nothing has to catch up and nothing gets estimated.

Knowing where the car is also means knowing when it has stopped moving. Every drive now has automatic stop detection, and this is how it plays out:

1. 1

   You park.

   The motion sensors stop seeing a moving vehicle. Getting out and walking away from the car counts as stopped too.

2. 2

   Ten minutes pass.

   Long enough that a red light, a drive-thru line or a stop for gas doesn't cut your drive short.

3. 3

   The drive pauses, backdated.

   The pause starts from the moment the car stopped, not from when the ten minutes ran out. A "Drive paused" notification appears with Resume and End buttons, even if the app isn't open.

4. 4

   You pull away again.

   DriveMint asks once, quietly, whether you're driving again. Resume and the timer picks up where it left off, or end the drive right there.

Detection uses your phone's motion sensors, so it works on drives logged without GPS too. You get stop detection either way, and distance whenever location is on.

Everyone does it once. You pull into the driveway, head inside, and the drive keeps running through dinner. In older versions that meant hours of parked time sitting in the log until you noticed and fixed it.

Now a forgotten drive is saved at the last moment the car was actually moving, not when you finally remembered. If DriveMint wasn't running when you parked, it checks the motion history the next time you open it and backdates the stop. And no single drive can run past six hours, so a drive you've completely forgotten about closes itself.

Supervised hours are what the DMV cares about, and the log is only useful if it's honest. Time spent parked outside a store isn't practice, and it shouldn't count toward your state's required hours. Accurate miles matter too, because they show how much road a learner has really covered. With background tracking and stop detection working together, the drive you log is the drive you did, without anyone having to babysit the app from the passenger seat.

The new engine runs entirely on your device. Your route is never saved and never uploaded. The only location DriveMint keeps is one rounded point per drive, used to work out the local sunset and sunrise for night hours. Motion data stays on the phone as well. Location is only used while a drive you started is running, and tracking stops the moment it ends. On Android, DriveMint doesn't even need the "Allow all the time" location permission, because it records through a visible notification only while a drive is in progress.

No accounts, no ads, no cloud. That hasn't changed.

Background tracking and stop detection arrived in version 1.7 and are part of every version since. Update DriveMint from the App Store or Google Play and start a drive. The first time, the app walks you through allowing location and motion access. On iPhone it needs iOS 16.4 or later. Everything else is in the release notes.