Recording a ride
Start, pause and finish a ride, keep it recording with the screen off, save battery, and get a ride back after the app was killed.
The Record tab tracks your ride and saves it to the library when you finish. It keeps recording with the screen off and with the app in the background, and it survives the app being closed or killed.
Recording is free and works with no connection at all.
Start, pause, finish#
- Open the Record tab. The sheet says Ready to ride and "The track is written to the phone while you ride, even with the screen off."
- Under Follow a route choose what the ride follows: No route, The route on the Plan tab (offered while there is one) or one of your saved routes. A route turns on the guidance described in turn-by-turn navigation. Until you choose, the tab proposes the route you came from: the route whose card you had open in the Library, or the plan on the Plan tab; your own pick then holds until the app is restarted.
- Tap Start ride.
- While riding the sheet shows a status pill, the elapsed clock, and the figures: Distance, Speed, Avg, then Ascent, Descent, Moving. While you follow a route a row Left and Arrival joins them: the distance still to ride and when you will arrive at your average speed so far, two dashes until the ride has an average.
- Pause stops the track where you are; Resume carries on. The break shows as a gap in the track. While paused the figures fade and the pill turns to PAUSED, so the state is plain at a glance.
- Finish saves the ride under a default name like Ride 17 Sept 2026 and opens its page.
If you finish having recorded nothing, Velorki says "Nothing was recorded." and saves no ride.
Auto-pause#
Velorki pauses itself after about ten seconds without movement; the pill then reads AUTO-PAUSED. Unlike a manual pause it keeps listening, and the first proper movement resumes it. A manual pause stops listening until you press Resume.
Heart rate, cadence and power#
Once a sensor is switched on, a third row of figures joins the sheet with what has been reported during this ride: Heart rate, Cadence and Power, so a watch alone adds one tile. The heart-rate tile carries the ride's Avg HR underneath. A sensor that falls silent mid-ride, a watch out of range or a strap that slipped, keeps its tile with the last value dimmed and a broken-link mark, so you can see that something stopped reporting; while the ride is paused the sensor rests on purpose and nothing is marked. They can come from a Bluetooth sensor, from an Apple Watch or from the phone's health app, they are written onto the track as you ride, and on an iPhone the pulse shows on the lock screen card as well. While a wheel sensor is reporting, its speed is what Speed shows.
Without a sensor none of it appears, and nothing is switched on until you do it in Settings → Sensors. See sensors and your watch.
The elevation profile and the cue sheet#
The sheet under the map has three pages, a swipe apart, with three dots under the figures saying which is up. A new ride starts on the figures. The sheet scrolls at any height and moves by its handle or its title, or by any of it when there is nothing to scroll, as during a ride. Before a ride, pulled all the way down, it folds into the navigation bar and leaves only the handle above the tabs, so the map is free; drag the handle up to bring it back. During a ride the tabs are away, and the sheet folds into a bar of the same shape with the ride's first four figures, distance, speed, average and ascent, and the map above it; a dot on it means paused. It has no buttons: tap it or pull it up to bring the sheet back.
The elevation profile, one swipe to the left: the followed route as height over distance, the part already ridden filled in the accent colour, the road ahead in grey, a line where you are, and above it what is left, "12.4 km left, 320 m to climb". On a climb of 3 % or more a second line says the grade and what is left to its top, "6 % climb, 120 m to the top", and once the ride has an average speed the same line says when you will arrive, "ETA 14:32". Without a route to follow the page says so: "Follow a route to see its elevation profile here."
The cue sheet, one more swipe: Upcoming turns, the next eight turns of the route in order with the distance to each, the points of interest on the route between them, and Arrive at the end, with "3 more" underneath when more follow. The first line is what the turn banner shows. A route imported with a cue sheet shows the author's own words for each turn, "Turn left onto Main Street", instead of the plain instruction.
What it asks for the first time#
The first ride triggers up to three prompts, described in full in getting started:
- Location, with Velorki's own explanation first.
- Notifications on Android, because the recording lives in one. Refuse and Velorki warns "Without the notification permission Android stops the recording when you leave the app."
- Battery optimisation on Android, once ever: "Android may stop the recording while the phone sleeps. Letting Velorki ignore battery optimisation keeps the track complete. You are asked only once."
Screen off, app closed#
The track is written to the phone as you ride, flushed every few seconds, so nothing depends on the app staying in the foreground.
- Android: the ride runs in a foreground service with an ongoing notification titled Recording a ride, whose second line carries your distance and time, and the next turn when you are following a route. Tapping it comes back to the app.
- iPhone: the ride keeps running with the screen locked, and a live activity shows the same figures on the lock screen.
Keep screen on in the Record sheet stops the display sleeping while a ride runs on the Record tab, which is handy on a handlebar mount and expensive for the battery. It is on until you turn it off, and your choice carries to the next ride; Settings → Recording has the same switch. The screen may sleep again while you pause the ride (not while it pauses itself at a stop), when you switch to another tab, and when the ride ends.
Battery saver#
The screen is what drains a phone on a long ride, so Battery saver attacks the screen. Turn it on in the Record sheet or in Settings → Recording: "Dark map, no animations, a plain page with the numbers after 30 s; the screen is what drains the battery".
While a ride records with the saver on, Velorki:
- forces the dark theme and a black map,
- draws a bare position dot, with no accuracy ring and no heading cone,
- jumps the camera instead of animating it,
- dims the display to 40 % while Keep screen on is holding it awake,
- and after 30 seconds without a touch replaces everything with a glance page: white on black, the next turn if there is one, then the first of your figures, by default Distance, as a big figure with the second, Speed, and Time under it.
Touch anywhere to bring the map back; the countdown starts again. Everything reverts when the ride ends or the saver goes off. The saver never changes the theme you chose for the rest of the app.
GPS precision in Settings → Recording is the other half: Battery saver, Normal or Precise, with the hint "Precise is for trails; Normal is enough for roads".
If a ride is interrupted#
Velorki writes the track to a journal file as it goes, so a crash, a force-quit or a phone that ran out of battery does not lose the ride.
- If the recording service is still alive when you come back, the app opens on the Record tab, quietly reattaches and carries on.
- If it is not, the app opens on the Record tab and asks at once, Unfinished ride: "A ride from 16 Sept 2026 was never finished. 42.1 km and 2 h 10 min are saved. Continue it or finish it now?" with three answers:
- Resume picks the ride up where it stopped,
- Finish saves what there is and opens the ride's card on the Library tab,
- Discard throws it away.
The dialog cannot be dismissed without answering, so a recovered ride is never silently lost. It is asked once per start of the app; a file or a shared route the app was opened with waits for the answer and opens after it.
Continuing a finished ride#
A ride you already finished can be carried on: open it from the library and choose Continue this ride from the menu at the top right. "Recording starts again on this ride: its track, distance, time and climb continue where they stopped, and the break until now counts as a pause."
If another ride is recording it is finished and saved first, and if this one was already uploaded to Strava or Ride with GPS you are told that the continued ride will need sending again.
Recent rides#
Under Recent rides on the Record tab are your last five, newest first, each with its date, distance and moving time. Swipe a row to the left to delete it, with an Undo in the message that follows. The full list is in the library.