Watch yourself the next time you get in the car. There's a little ritual nobody talks about. You sit down, and before you so much as touch the gear selector you're thumbing through your phone: flip on Do Not Disturb so the texts quit buzzing, open your music, pull up maps, turn the phone sideways and wedge it in the mount. Four or five taps, every single time, before you've gone anywhere.
I've done that ritual probably ten thousand times. And one day it occurred to me that it's exactly the kind of dumb, repetitive thing a phone ought to just do. So that's the next thing we're building. It's called TrippMode.
What it is
TrippMode notices when you start driving — your phone pairs with the car's Bluetooth, or you plug it in to charge, or it simply feels the car moving — and it runs your setup for you, automatically. No tapping. You get in, and the cockpit's already arranged the way you like it.
You decide what "your setup" means. Mix and match whatever you want:
- Silence the noise. Flip on Do Not Disturb or your driving focus so the texts and notifications wait until you've parked.
- Start the music. Launch your music or podcast app and pick up where you left off.
- Open the map. Fire up Google Maps — or your navigation of choice — ready to go.
- Set the screen. Lock it to landscape or portrait, however you mount it.
- Phone or tablet. Plenty of folks run a tablet on the dash now. TrippMode works the same on either.
Then when you get where you're going and the car shuts off, it puts everything back. Notifications return, the focus lifts, and you're a normal person again.
"Don't these already exist?"
Sort of. You can rig some of this up today if you're the type — Apple's Driving Focus does a slice of it, Android Auto does another slice, and the power-user automation apps will let you build the whole thing if you're willing to spend an evening wiring up triggers and actions like you're programming a thermostat. (Fun fact: Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century Danish king, Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, who got tribes that wouldn't cooperate to work together. Feels about right for what it's doing here.)
The trouble is none of those were built for this — for travel, for the road tripper, for somebody who just wants to get in and drive. They're either too narrow or too fiddly, and a few of them want to show you ads while you're at it. We thought the road deserved a tool that was actually made for it.
The TrippApps way
So TrippMode is going to be what everything we make is: dead simple, and ad-free, with a free version that stays free. Setup you can finish in a couple of minutes, not a couple of hours. No banner sliding in between you and the road — that runs against the entire point, which is to get the technology out of your way so you can drive.
It's also built to sit right alongside the rest of the family. Plan the trip in MotoTripp, RoadTripp, or ElecTripp, then let TrippMode handle the get-in-and-go part so the only thing left for you to do is point the car down the road.
It's coming — tell us what you'd trigger
TrippMode's in development now. No firm date yet; we'd rather get it right than get it out. But I wanted to put it in front of you early, because the best ideas for this stuff come from the people who actually live on the road.
So here's the ask: when you get in your car, what do you wish just happened on its own? Tell me — it genuinely steers what we build. In the meantime, there's a whole trip waiting to be planned, and that part you can do today.