Group ride tracking for motorcycle convoys

Why sharing your location is not enough

A location share in a chat app shows one person, for a set time, to whoever is in that chat. On a ten-day trip with eight riders that means eight shares to start, eight to renew, and no single place where the whole group is visible. Worse, a dot that stopped updating looks exactly like a rider who stopped riding.

Group riding needs the opposite: everyone, all day, on one map, with a clear difference between a position that is live and one that is only the last thing the app heard.

What the live convoy map shows

• Every rider on the trip, on one map, for as long as the ride is active.
• Live or last known, always marked. A rider whose phone has gone quiet shows their final position and how long ago it was, so the group knows exactly where to look.
• Who is rolling, stopped or resting, on a muster board you can read at a glance at a fuel stop.
• The convoy stretch: how far the group is spread from the lead rider to the sweep.
• A notice when someone drops behind, so the sweep hears about it before the gap becomes a search.
• Rally points: the places the group agreed to regroup, which work with no signal at all.

Lead, sweep and the rest of the crew

A convoy rides with a lead at the front and a sweep at the back. Qafilaa gives both roles to named riders, and the map is drawn around them: the stretch is measured between them, and they hear first when someone falls back. The roles are positions in the convoy, not powers over the trip, so they can be handed around during a ride without handing over the plan.

When the signal drops

On the roads this app was built for, it will. Every phone keeps its own position and its last copy of everyone else's, so the map never goes blank. A rider out of coverage keeps recording, and their phone sends its positions as soon as it reconnects. If the whole group is out of signal, the rally point is the plan: everyone rides to the next one and waits. It needs no network to work, which is why the app is built around it.

Getting the whole group on the map

• The host creates the trip, names it and dates it.
• One invite code brings the crew in. Each rider joins from their own phone.
• The lobby shows who is actually ready before anyone starts an engine.
• One person calls the roll-out, and every phone in the group knows the ride has started.

Privacy and battery

Your position is shared only with the riders on your trip, and only while a ride is active. It stops when the ride ends or you leave the group. There is no public map, no advertising and no data broker, and raw location traces are deleted automatically after 90 days. The privacy policy has the detail.

Battery mode publishes your position less often on long straight legs and returns to full frequency near passes and rally points, where knowing exactly where everyone is matters most.

Tracking is one half of riding together. The other half is what happens when someone goes down: see crash detection and SOS, and how the map keeps working in dead zones.