Day and night map
The map has a light look for daylight and a dark one for after sunset. Out of the box it changes over on its own, worked out from where you are and what day it is. If you’d rather it stayed put, you can pin it.
Open the menu and you’ll find Display mode with three choices. The text on the right tells you what’s in force — and, in auto, which look you’re getting right now.
Picking one closes the menu straight away and the map changes underneath you.
The three choices
- Auto — the app decides, from sunrise and sunset where you are. This is how it starts out. The label beside it reads Auto (day now) or Auto (dark now) so you can see which way it’s currently leaning.
- Day — the light map, all the time. The label reads Day fixed.
- Dark — the dark map, all the time. The label reads Dark fixed.
Whatever you choose is remembered, and it’s still there next time you open the app.
How auto works out the time
It isn’t a fixed clock time. The app takes the latitude from your GPS position and the day of the year, works out roughly when the sun rises and sets there, and switches on those times. Ride from Cairns to Hobart and the changeover moves with you; ride through midwinter and it comes earlier than it did in summer.
Until the phone has its first GPS fix, there’s no latitude to work with, so it falls back to a plain 6 am and 6 pm. Once a fix arrives, the real times take over.
The calculation is a simplified one — accurate to roughly half an hour either side of the real sunrise or sunset. It’s built to get the map looking right, not to tell you when to switch your headlight on.
When it checks
Two moments:
- Every minute, quietly in the background, for as long as auto is selected.
- The instant you come back to the app, so a ride that starts after a long stop with the phone in your pocket doesn’t sit on the wrong map waiting for the next tick.
Because of the once-a-minute check, the changeover can land up to a minute after actual sunset. Nothing is wrong — it hasn’t come around yet.
Choose Day or Dark and the checks stop having any effect. The map stays exactly where you put it until you set it back to Auto.
What happens at the moment it switches
Changing the look rebuilds the whole map, so for a moment everything drawn on top of it has to be put back. The app does that for you: the route line, the navigation arrow, your markers, the heatmap, and any of the map layers you had switched on all return by themselves.
You’ll see a brief flicker as it happens. That’s the map reloading, and it’s normal — including mid-ride with navigation running.
Auto suits most people, and it’s what you get if you never touch it. Pinning Dark is worth it if you ride a lot at dusk and would rather the map didn’t change look in the middle of a set of corners. Pinning Day suits bright glare and a mount that catches a lot of sun.
Where to find it
The menu is the only place this lives — there’s no day/night button on the map itself. Open the menu, look for Display mode with the sun icon, and tap one of the three.