Bike commutes, recorded automatically.
VADO is an iOS app that records your rides on its own. Nothing to press when you leave, nothing to press when you arrive. Opt in and it also ranks workplaces by how much their people cycle to work.
It works while you forget about it.
The whole design follows from one constraint: a ride must never be silently lost, and the phone must not burn its battery waiting for one.
- Sleeps at idle.
- No GPS, no location indicator, nothing running.
- Wakes when you leave.
- A geofence exit at home or work starts the check, and recent motion has to look like cycling before anything is recorded.
- Holds one session.
- A single continuous location session for the whole ride, so the route comes back without gaps.
- Finalizes on arrival.
- At home or work, or once you have been stopped long enough for the ride to be over.
- Shows the ride.
- A list entry and a route on a map, with distance, duration, average and top speed, and elevation gain.
It ranks workplaces, never people.
Turn sharing on and every finished commute sends one record: the workplace you picked in the app, the date, the distance. The server sums those per workplace and hands back the whole board. Your phone does the ranking and the filtering, so the server never learns which workplace you care about.
Everything one commute sends
- Workplace
- Acme Srl
- Where
- Milano (MI)
- Date
- 28 August 2026
- Distance
- 4.8 km
What comes back is a set of totals and never a rate, and it is self-reported rather than verified: the server gets counts and no route, so what the board measures is cycling as detected on a rider’s phone.
What never leaves the phone.
Not withheld by policy, absent by construction. There is nothing in the record to strip.
- The route
- Any coordinate
- Speed
- Elevation
- Time of day
- An account
- A login
- A device id
- Any identifier at all
No identifier of any kind, on the wire or at rest. Every request carries a shared key, and the key says the app is the app. It says nothing about who is holding it.
How the riders get counted.
A board of workplaces still has to know how many people ride to each one. Your phone answers four yes or no questions: is this the first record I have sent this week, this month, this year, ever, at this workplace. The server adds one to a tally and keeps nothing else.
So no row anywhere belongs to a person. The count cannot be audited, decremented, or traced back, and your phone is the only thing that knows what it has already announced.
The device is the source of truth.
Local first and privacy first, as a permanent identity of the product rather than a first version simplification. Your rides live on your phone. There is no cloud sync, nothing syncs by default, and there is no analytics, no crash reporting and no telemetry. Ever.
- Sharing is off by default.
- You opt in, it goes one way, and you can turn it back off.
- You see the record first.
- Built from your own latest commute, with the real answers your phone would send.
- Deleting a ride retracts it.
- The record comes off the board, whether or not the app ever got confirmation that it landed.
- Deleting a ride does not un-count you.
- A tally has no memory of who added to it, so nothing can decrement it. Deleting the app retracts nothing either, there being no account to retract through.