Help & Guide

Last updated: 2026-10-27

How RideDots Works

Motion sickness in moving vehicles often arises from sensory conflict: your eyes focus on a static screen inside the vehicle (reading, watching a video or messaging), signaling that you are stationary, while your inner ear (vestibular system) feels the turns, acceleration and braking of the vehicle.

RideDots displays subtle, animated dots along the left and right edges of your screen. Driven by your phone’s motion sensors, these dots move opposite to vehicle acceleration, providing peripheral visual cues of real movement so your brain can reconcile the conflicting signals without interrupting what you are doing.

Safe Passenger Use

RideDots is designed strictly for passengers. Never use, configure or watch RideDots while driving or controlling a vehicle or bicycle. Safe driving requires your complete and undivided attention on the road.

Required Permissions

RideDots requires two permissions to function:

Display over other apps: Enables the two narrow edge dot strips to float over other apps while you read or browse. The dots are touch-through, so you can interact with your underlying apps normally.
Notifications: On Android 13 and newer, this shows an ongoing status notification while the dots are active, allowing you to stop the motion cues at any moment with one tap.

Starting and Stopping

You can control RideDots in three convenient ways:

In-App Toggle: Open RideDots and tap the main Start/Stop button.
Quick Settings Tile: Pull down your Android notification shade, tap the edit (pencil) icon, and drag the RideDots tile into your active tiles. Tap it anytime to toggle motion cues without opening the app.
Home Screen Widget: Long-press on your home screen, select Widgets, find RideDots, and place the compact control widget on your screen.

Orientation and Calibration

RideDots dynamically compensates for device rotation and works in both portrait and landscape modes. For best results, hold your device naturally in your hands. If the phone lies flat on a seat or table, motion sensitivity may differ; you can adjust the sensitivity slider in Settings to match your preference.

Screen-Off and Battery Life

Whenever your device screen turns off or locks, RideDots immediately pauses all sensor readings and overlay drawing. The foreground service remains available for session controls, but motion sensor listeners and overlay drawing are suspended. Actual energy use depends on the device and operating system. For this design, RideDots does not request any battery-optimization exemption.

System and Overlay Limits

Android security intentionally suppresses third-party overlays over sensitive system views, including lock screens, system permission prompts, password input fields, and certain banking apps. This is a built-in Android security safeguard. RideDots will resume displaying edge dots as soon as you navigate away from protected screens.

Settings and Customization

In RideDots Settings, you can customize:

Dot Size: Adjust the diameter of the edge dots for subtle or prominent cues.
Opacity: Set how translucent the dots appear (between 20% and 70%).
Sensitivity: Tune how strongly vehicle acceleration moves the dots.
Color: Pick an accent color that best suits your screen background.
Smooth Motion: Enable smoothed motion filtering for smoother animation.

RideDots is completely free. A small banner ad may appear on the Settings screen when no motion session is running. In the Support dialog, you can optionally watch a short video to pause banner ads for 30 minutes, or make a voluntary contribution via PayPal. No core features are locked behind payment or ads.

Contact and Feedback

Have questions, feedback or suggestions? Write to support@wolfmajer.com. Please mention your device model and Android version.