7.2 - A Fresh Look, Simpler to Ride

A Fresh Look, Simpler to Ride

You told me, and you were right: BikeControl had become too convoluted. Every release added something useful, and every one of those things added a screen, a switch or a word you had to understand before your buttons did anything in your trainer app.

So for 7.2 I read through every support chat from the last two months, looked at where people got stuck, and simplified the app around that. It has a refreshed look, it gives you a lot more help when something doesn't work, and it fixes more than 100 bugs along the way.

Four tabs, one place for your ride

BikeControl now has four tabs: Ride, Devices, Activity and Settings.

Ride is the screen you keep open while you ride. At the top it tells you whether you're ready, then shows your virtual shifting, with the gear you're in, your power, cadence and heart rate, and below it your buttons. If something isn't working, the button at the bottom takes you straight to help.

Devices is where your controllers, your smart trainer and your trainer app live. Activity has your rides and the news from this blog. Settings has everything else, including your plan.

Setup tells you what's missing, and waits before it complains

When something isn't set up yet, Ride lists exactly what's missing, one step per row, each with a short reason. Tap a row and it takes you to the fix. Steps that depend on an earlier one wait their turn instead of all shouting at once.

And when you open the app, BikeControl now gives your controllers, your trainer and your trainer app a few seconds to find each other before it lists anything. No more "3 steps left" flickering on screen while everything is still connecting. If everything connects, you go straight to Ready to ride.

Your rides, recorded

With a smart trainer connected, BikeControl now records your ride on its own from the first pedal stroke. That's useful if your trainer app doesn't save your rides at all, or only saves part of them, for example without power, cadence or heart rate, or not to Apple Health or Health Connect. In Activity you'll find your rides by week. Each ride shows your power and heart rate zones (set your FTP and max heart rate once), your cadence, the gears you rode and how long you spent in each one.

Share a ride as a .fit file to Strava, Garmin Connect or TrainingPeaks; it carries every virtual shift you made. Rides can also go to Apple Health, and now on Android to Health Connect.

Steering that feels like steering

Phone steering now reads your handlebar more precisely and shows the live angle in degrees, instead of pretending to be two buttons. Its page shows what it does, how far you can turn before it steers, and how to recalibrate.

For developers of trainer apps and games: BikeControl now sends the real handlebar angle over the OpenBikeControl protocol, from phone steering, the Elite Sterzo and the Rizer. Apps that ask for it can steer proportionally instead of only left and right.

This one came from the community: thanks to michidk, who builds VoxVelo, which turns Minecraft into an indoor cycling workout, for asking for it and contributing an adjustment to BikeControl to make it happen.

And a lot of smaller things

• On iPhone and iPad, swipe back from anywhere on a page, and swipe sheets down to close them.
• BKOOL smart bikes get resistance control.
• Friendlier messages when something goes wrong, instead of error codes.
• More than 100 fixes across setup, shifting, rides and connections.

If something still feels harder than it should, tell me. The support chat is in the app under Settings → Help Center, and every message there helps shape the next version.