Tapping the VeloViewer logo in the Live app will take you to the main page. The “Settings” button is then shown on that page. Here are the list of settings and what they do:
- Recon mode: Allows you to add/edit remove waymarkers within the Live app. Not available to single race/stage Live app users. Team users who don’t have full access have limited functionality in recon mode: they can add bidon/feed waymarkers but not anything else.
- Share location: Check this box if you want to share your live location with other Live app users in your organisation. You will need to enter the text to be displayed next to your location in the text box. Best to keep that short so it doesn’t take up too much space on the map for the other users. It can be your name, or something more functional e.g. “Doctor”, “Broom wagon”. You also need to set the “Location frequency” in order to share your location.
- Location frequency: Determines how frequently the location of your colleagues is fetched from the server (and your own location is sent if the “Share location” box has been checked). 1 second would be the best option if you are actively moving with the race, or if you want to see the most recent locations of your colleagues. If you are the bus driver you might want to use 1 minute so your colleagues have a rough idea where you are and can see where you park.
- Hide user when data >: Determines how old the last location for each user should be before they are hidden from the map.
- Last location < 5 minutes old: name shown with a green background.
- Last location > 5 minutes and < hide user time: name shown with grey background.
- Last location > hide user time: not shown on map.
- Show distance markers: Determines whether the distance markers are shown along the route on the map.
- Reverse map distances: Shows the distance waymarkers counting down to the finish rather than counting up from km zero.
- Reverse distance scale: Shows the distance beneath the elevation profile below the map counting down to the finish rather than counting up form km zero.
- Show distance circles: Overlays faint circles centred on your current location to show you 2, 5, 10 & 25 km horizontal distances.
- Grayscale map: Removes colour from the map tile images.
- Map direction: Three choices for how the map rotates. Note that the amount of the route that is shown is based on the zoom dropdown in the bottom right of the map view which defaults to “Full” but then lets you pick different lengths from 500 m to 50 km:
- North up: No rotation, always fixed with North pointing up.
- Direction up: Auto rotates so the next 50 metres of the route is pointing straight up. If approaching a large change in direction then this could result in some of the route being out of view.
- Best fit: Based on the zoom dropdown value, it will show this distance vertically in the map view.
- Show zoom buttons: If you are running the Live app on your built-in car display (using a Carlinkit) then the screen probably won’t support multi-touch meaning you can’t pinch zoom on the map. Double tapping will zoom in, but then you can’t zoom out. Selecting this setting will show +/- buttons to let you zoom in and out easily.
- Wind arrow direction: The wind indicators (in Wind waymarkers in the list, in waymarker popups and when tapping on the map) will display the wind direction in one of two ways:
- Relative to rider: The most useful in my opinion. A little bike will be shown always pointing up, the wind arrow is then shown relative to the bike. This way you’ll easily be able to see that the wind is, for example, a cross-tailwind at that specific location.
- Relative to North: Shows a North icon and the wind arrow is then shown relative to that. Useful if you want to know if it is, for example, a SW wind, but you would then need to work out the rider’s direction at that location to know if it is a cross-wind.
- Tile padding: When you open a route in the Live app you will be shown a button in the top left to “Save [n] required map tiles”. Pressing this while you have a good internet connection will download a number of different zoom level map tiles along the full length of the course. This means that if you go into areas of poor/no internet, the Live app is still able to display the map as you move. By default, it will only download map tiles that touch the route. When selected, the Tile padding option means it will download additional map tiles either side of the default ones. This will increase the number of tiles saved but potentially useful if you are doing races with very poor mobile signal. If you have a good internet connection along the route, the Live app will just download map tiles as it needs them.
- Extra map detail: The saved map tiles for a route will only be down to a certain zoom level designed to be adequately detailed when zoomed to show the upcoming 5 km or even 2 km of the route. You can enable this option to download more detailed map images if you are zoomed to 2 km or less. Very useful for time trials where you might be zoomed in to only 500 m. You will need an active internet connection to allow the Live app to download the map tiles as you move.
- Saved map tiles: This shows a count of the map tiles that have been saved to your device. The device will have a limit to how many it can save but unfortunately it is virtually impossible for the code to work out what that would be. If you have issues saving map tiles, press the “Clear” button to delete all the old map tiles you probably no longer need, reload the app, and then it should be OK again.
- Compact view: This feature is designed to be used when you are running the Live app on a phone with a small screen. With the compact view enabled, when the phone is in portrait mode, it will display with the waymarker list filling the whole screen. A ⇄ button is shown at the top to swap to a full-screen map view. The main use for this is on motorbike handlebars for police and marshals so they can easily see the locations they need to stop that can be listed in the waymarker list.
- Flip view: Swaps the waymarker list to the other side of the map.
- Distance units: Choose between metric and imperial units of measurement.
- Current user: The unique number of the Strava account this installation of the Live app is running for.
- Rider tracking: For races that support rider tracking, checking this option will prompt the Live app to attempt to get the live rider data. Up to this point (2026) this has been available for races supported by Velon and is restricted to allow teams to only see their own rider’s locations. Hopefully this functionality will be extended to other providers and to offer a live rider view to other stakeholders (race organiser, commissaires etc) but the feasibility of this will depend more on the data providers.