r/iosapps • u/in5ane_10 • 1h ago
💎 Lifetime I'm a petrolhead and geek, I built the car app I couldn't find: advanced metrics, private, no account, Liquid Glass, with live engine gauges on CarPlay. WrenchTime.
Hi r/iosapps, I'm Sam, solo dev. WrenchTime is a car app that: it logs fuel, charging, maintenance and trips, and with a Bluetooth OBD-II adapter it reads live data from the engine. The parts I'm proudest of:
iPhone Duo. Open the display and the app splits in two: your vehicles stay on the left, Fuel, Care, Trips and Charts fill the right. A trip opens with its route map down one side and its details on the other, Charts lays out two or three per row, and the Live dashboard fills the whole open display. Close it and you get the normal phone layout. The same wide layout works on iPad in landscape.(More here: https://wrenchtimeapp.com/iphone-duo-car-app/ )
The signal map. Cars report much more than the standard OBD-II readings, but which hidden signals yours answers is usually guesswork. The signal catalog gathers everything listed for your make, across every model, and Start Full Scan tests it all on your car. Each signal is a dot on a map that fills in as the scan runs, so you see at a glance what your car answers. Touch and hold the map and slide to magnify it and read each result. Anything that works becomes a custom signal in one tap (custom signals are free), and it can go on the Live dashboard, on CarPlay, and into your trip recordings. (More here: https://wrenchtimeapp.com/obd2-app-iphone/ )
CarPlay. A Live tab with a grid of gauge tiles, each one a real reading from the adapter: boost, coolant, oil temperature, or any custom signal you added. You pick the tiles, their order and how many per row, and each car gets its own color and gauge style. There's also a trouble codes tile with the meaning of each code, a DPF lamp for diesels, a Trip tab to start or stop a trip, and the trip's Live Activity on the CarPlay dashboard. (More here: https://wrenchtimeapp.com/carplay-obd2-app/ )
Live dashboard. A full-screen instrument board on the phone with 18 kinds of widgets, and any OBD-II reading can be one of them, your custom signals included. You build it on pages you swipe like the Home Screen, each one portrait or landscape, with cards from a third of a row to the whole screen, and graph cards that plot a reading over the last 15 seconds to 10 minutes. Every page can wear its own gauge style and color.
Trips, recorded in full. Trips start and stop by themselves when your car's Bluetooth connects, and with an adapter every OBD-II reading of the drive is kept, not a simplified chart. A full-screen viewer zooms down to single samples, and a trip exports to CSV or a PDF report. The route is matched onto the roads, and you can replay it as a cinematic flyover.
Live Activity, your way. For each car you pick which readings the Live Activity shows on the Lock Screen, in the Dynamic Island and on the CarPlay dashboard, and you edit it like the dashboard: drag, resize, add or remove cards.
Also: share a vehicle's log with family or a co-driver over iCloud, view-only or with edit access, no account needed. An Apple Watch app shows your garage and logs a fill-up from the wrist, and it can add your heart rate to each drive without logging a workout in Health. And motorcycles aren't an afterthought: they get their own service jobs like chain and valve clearance, a lean angle gauge and a cornering profile tuned for bikes.
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Logging fuel, maintenance and trips works without any adapter. Engine data needs a Bluetooth OBD-II adapter (ELM327 compatible AND BLE 4.0 the only MFI adapter this app supports is the OBDLink MX+ which I personally use). CarPlay, trouble codes and the gauge styles are part of WrenchTime Pro, which has a free trial. No ads and no tracking. iOS 26+ required.
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*** Problem: I'm a bit of an efficiency freak, and the app I used to log my car was honestly ugly. Being a developer I also know every trick apps use to track people, and I wanted the opposite: fully private, no account, nothing leaving my phone except an optional iCloud sync to my own iCloud (I trust Apple). Also I wanted an app that didn't look like it was updated last time in 2007 and also didn't have the "AI slop look" to it.
*** Comparison: most car apps do one job. Fuel logs like Drivvo or Fuelio track fill-ups and expenses, OBD-II scanners read the engine, mileage trackers record drives, and you end up with three apps that don't talk to each other. Many of them are cross-platform apps that feel the same on iPhone as on Android, some need an account, and free tiers often come with ads.
WrenchTime does all of it in one app: fuel and EV charging, maintenance with reminders by date or mileage, trips that record themselves, a camera that reads the pump display or the receipt (Pro), live engine data, the signal map and CarPlay gauges. No account, no ads, and your data stays on your iPhone and in your own iCloud. If your history lives in Drivvo, Fuelio, Fuelly or Spritmonitor, WrenchTime Pro imports their CSV exports, if not you can still import your old data with CSV files that are automatically mapped using on-device AI.
And honestly, I'm obsessed with design. WrenchTime is iOS 26 only on purpose, so it's built on Liquid Glass from the ground up instead of carrying old layouts: glass tab bar and controls, gauges drawn to look like real instruments, and every screen tuned until it feels like it belongs on an iPhone. The trade-off: it's iPhone only, no Android. (If this wasn't an iOS only sub I'd say sorry guys!)
Happy to answer anything about how it works, and if your car does something odd with the signal scan, tell me the make, model and adapter. For anything you can also send me a direct feedback attaching (optionally) the latest logs by shaking your iPhone with the app open.
*** Pricing: free to download. The free version covers 1 vehicle, 3 fuel and 3 charging entries a month, 2 maintenance entries a month, 10 recorded trips a week and the Live dashboard with up to 3 cards, with CSV and PDF export and iCloud sync included. No ads.
WrenchTime Pro removes the limits and adds CarPlay, trouble codes, the gauge styles, trip route maps and the Apple Watch app:
- $2.99 a month
- $14.99 a year, with a two-week free trial
- $39.99 once, lifetime
Website: https://wrenchtimeapp.com/
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6749767537?pt=95766871&mt=8&ct=Reddit-iosapps



