Dash cam · OBD‑II · Trip log · iPhone & Android
Every drive,on the record.
Shiny Dash records the whole drive with the speed, heading and time burned into the video file, reads your car’s live data and fault codes over a Bluetooth OBD‑II dongle, keeps a permanent log of every journey, and explains what the dashboard light actually means.
Store links are placeholders until the listings go live.
REC
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OBD87KM/H
GPS 86 KM/H · NE 041°
RPM 2140
COOLANT 89°C
FUEL 4.2 L/100
N 43.6532 W 079.3832
COOLANT 89°C
FUEL 4.2 L/100
N 43.6532 W 079.3832
The HUD is composited into every encoded frame — not an app overlay. Play the file anywhere and the numbers are still there.
- Platforms
- iPhone & Android
- In the car
- CarPlay & Android Auto
- Account
- None required
- Storage
- On your phone
- Units
- Metric or imperial
Settings → Features
Seven switches. Turn off what you don’t drive with.
Every part of the app is one switch, on by default. Turning one off removes its screen and stops the work behind it — no polling, no sensors, no battery. Use it as a full vehicle companion, or as nothing but a dash cam.
Dash Cam
Recording, the burned‑in HUD, impact detection, voice commands, markers and trimming.
Driver Behaviour
The per‑drive scorecard, its full breakdown and the live coach.
Business Trips
Business or personal on every journey, purpose and notes, and the CSV mileage report.
Live Engine Data
The OBD‑II gauges on the phone and the readings on the head unit.
Trouble Codes & Health
Fault codes and their history, trend warnings and the AI explanation.
Parking Spot
Where you left the car, recorded on its own, with walking directions back.
Break Reminders
A suggestion to stop after a long, unbroken stretch at one speed.
Trips
Not a switch — the journey log is written whatever else is on. It’s what everything hangs off.
Feature · Dash Cam
It records the drive, not a five‑minute window.
A rolling buffer only keeps what somebody thought to press a button for, in a window they had to guess at. Shiny Dash records the journey whole and keeps it until it is superseded — so the footage is already there when you find out you need it.
Starts itself
No button to forget
Recording begins when the drive does, and comes back after the app is backgrounded. Stop it by hand any time; a manual stop is remembered until you next open the app.
Burned in
Speed, heading, time, place
The HUD is composited into every encoded frame, so it survives export, AirDrop, upload and anyone else’s player. Speed is always labelled OBD or GPS — it never claims a source it doesn’t have.
Markers
Mark it as it happens
Tap once, or say “start event”, and the moment is marked on the drive with a reason attached. Nothing is copied and nothing is duplicated — the marker names a range of footage you already have.
Trimming
Pull out just that bit
Trim any range out of a drive afterwards into a clip you can keep or share. The telemetry sidecar is merged and re‑based with it, so the exported clip carries its own data.
Automatic
Panic stops and impacts
A hard brake, a swerve or a hit starts a marker on its own, from the accelerometer and the speed stream, with the sensitivity you choose. It is a recording trigger, not a crash detector.
Housekeeping
It won’t fill your phone
Drives are segmented and superseded footage is purged automatically. The app watches free space and battery, keeps the screen awake while recording, and asks before it discards anything.
The spine · Trips
One record per journey, kept for as long as you own the car.
When it ran, where it started and finished, what the odometer read at each end, how far, how long, in which vehicle. Video is gigabytes an hour and gets swept; a trip is a few hundred bytes, so a decade of driving costs less than one segment of video.
Named, not coordinates
Start and end are reverse‑geocoded to real place names, so the list reads like your week rather than a column of latitudes.
The route, drawn
Every journey has its map — Apple Maps on iPhone, Google Maps on Android — with the track it actually took.
The footage and the score hang off it
Open a trip and the video for it is there if it was recorded, and the drive score is there if it was measured. One journey, one place to look.
Never purged on a timer
Nothing about age, disk space or classification removes a trip. The only thing that does is forgetting the vehicle, and that asks first and tells you how many journeys go with it.
Feature · Driver Behaviour
A score you can argue with.
Every drive is measured while it is driven and scored afterwards, out of seven components. Each one is a plain two‑point scale, and the app shows you the sentence behind the number rather than a grade out of nowhere.
How the drive score is weighted
Seven components, 100 points. Weight reflects how defensible the measurement is.
Braking is heaviest because every road car brakes far harder than the threshold — it measures the driver, not the car. Engine speed is lightest because on an automatic the gear is the gearbox’s decision.
Honest by default
Unavailable is never zero
An electric car has no idling and keeps five components. A car that doesn’t report throttle loses two. The total renormalises over what was actually measurable, and if too little was, the app withholds the score instead of inventing one.
Live coach
While you’re driving
Gentle, in‑the‑moment feedback on the drive as it happens — and it never raises a notification, because “you braked harder than usual” must not compete with “charging voltage is low”.
Trends
Compared against you
Findings come from this vehicle’s own earlier drives, not a league table of strangers. Harsh braking and acceleration counts are pulled from the speed stream and survive one bad sample.
Feature · Business Trips
Mileage that is already written by the time you claim it.
Business or personal
Two taps on the trip row, with a purpose and notes when you want them. Every trip carries who classified it — you, or a rule.
Rules do the boring ones
Classification rules catch the commute and the regular runs automatically, and you can always overrule them.
Odometer at both ends
A prompt after the drive captures the real reading when you have it, so the claim rests on the odometer rather than on GPS alone.
A CSV, emailed
Pick a date range and the report leaves as a spreadsheet — dates, places, distance, purpose — ready for whoever asks for it.
Distance you can defend
Measured from the track, reconciled against the odometer pair, and never silently rounded into something it wasn’t.
Still there next year
A mileage record has to survive the phone filling up and the footage being swept. This one does.
Feature · Live Engine Data · Trouble Codes & Health
What the car is actually doing, and what the light means.
Pair a Bluetooth OBD‑II dongle once. It reconnects on its own from then on — on launch, when you start recording, and when a session drops while you’re still moving.
Live
Gauges while you drive
Speed, RPM, coolant, intake, fuel, load, voltage and more — on the phone, in the video overlay, and on the head unit. Choose which readings you want and in what order; they follow you to every surface.
Setup
Even the awkward dongles
A guided setup walks through pairing, and clone adapters that use non‑standard Bluetooth serial channels can be pointed at the right ones in Settings instead of simply failing.
Missing is missing
Blank, never zero
Not every car reports every reading. A value the vehicle doesn’t send is shown as absent rather than as a confident 0 — including in the recorded footage.
Fault codes
Read on connect, not just on demand
Codes are read every time the adapter connects, which is what catches a fault that appears and clears between two visits to the screen. Read them by hand any time as well.
History
The intermittent one is the useful one
A code read is a snapshot; the history is the record. Shiny Dash keeps first seen, last seen, when it cleared and how many times it has come back — the single most useful thing to know about a fault, and the thing a one‑off scan always misses.
Predictive
Warnings from trends
Rules run over your own drive history — charging voltage, running temperature, fuel trims, overdue service — and raise a warning before it becomes a light.
Code history · example
- Code
- P0420
- First seen
- 12 Mar
- Last seen
- 28 Aug
- Occurrences
- 4 — intermittent
P0420
Catalyst efficiency below threshold
Explained in plain language, for your car and your region: what the code means, whether it is safe to keep driving, the likely causes in order, what a repair tends to cost in your own currency, and whether it is worth doing on a vehicle of this age and mileage.
Driveable — with care
Est. repair cost, local currency
Emissions test: will fail
Illustrative. The AI explanation needs your own Azure OpenAI key configured; without one, everything else on this screen still works and the app says so.
Per vehicle · Maintenance & glovebox
The paperwork that makes the car worth something.
Save a vehicle by VIN and its make, model, engine, drivetrain and body are decoded and filled in for you. Everything after that is the car’s own file.
Service history
What was done, when, at what reading, and what it cost
One record per job with the receipt photographed and attached. Nothing here is ever swept on a timer — it is the single most valuable thing the app holds at resale, and a rule that deleted it would be destroying the only copy.
Schedule
What wants doing next
A mileage‑based schedule per vehicle, each item with its own interval. The summary under the row tells you whether anything is overdue before you tap it, and an overdue item becomes a health warning.
Glovebox
Bill of sale, ownership, insurance
The documents that prove the car is yours, photographed and kept with it. Files live on disk, so a receipt off a modern phone camera costs nothing to keep.
Odometer
It says when it is guessing
The odometer isn’t a standard OBD reading and most cars never report one. Shiny Dash estimates it from your own driving and always tells you where the figure came from, rather than presenting an estimate as a fact.
CarPlay & Android Auto
On the head unit, only what belongs at 100 km/h.
The same readings, the same units, the same words — projected onto the car’s own screen as a small set of things that are safe to do while moving. The phone and the dashboard cannot drift apart, because both are drawing the same state.
- Speed
- 87KM/H
- Engine
- 2140RPM
- Coolant
- 89°C
- Battery
- 14.1V
Mark this momentTrouble codesWhere I parkedTrip
Mark it without touching the phone
The one control that matters at speed is on the head unit, and on the steering‑wheel voice command.
Your chosen readings
The gauges you picked on the phone are the gauges the car shows, in the same order and the same units.
Switches carry over
Turn a feature off and it leaves the head unit too. There is no second set of settings to keep in step.
Around the driving
The quiet half.
Break reminders
A suggestion after a long, unbroken stretch
Held at one speed on one kind of road for long enough, the app chimes once and suggests stopping when it is safe to. It is not a drowsiness detector and is never presented as one — nothing looks at the driver. It measures exposure: how long the vehicle has been driven that way, which is the only thing it can honestly see. It suggests; it never instructs.
Parking spot
Where you left it, without being asked
The spot is recorded when the drive ends. Open the app in the car park and it offers walking directions before you have found the screen — and stays quiet when you are standing at the car, when the car is far away, and after you have said no.
Voice
“Start event” / “Stop event”
Mark a moment without taking a hand off the wheel. Recognition runs on‑device, so it works with no signal and nothing said in the car leaves the phone. Off by default, and it only ever listens while recording.
Day & night
The screen follows the sky
The palette switches on the sun’s actual elevation and on how bright the scene in front of the camera is — not on a clock. Screen brightness can be held up while recording and released when you leave.
Notifications
Told once, or not at all
Trip finished, scorecard ready, adapter connected, health warning, car parked — each one is its own switch. If you are looking at the app, it uses a toast instead; the same news never arrives twice.
Units
One switch, everywhere
Metric or imperial changes speed, distance, temperature, pressure and fuel volume across every screen, the burned‑in video overlay, the exported telemetry and both head units. Nobody who thinks in miles is shown a coolant gauge in Celsius.
Where your driving lives
There is no server. There is no account.
Shiny Dash has no backend to sign up to and nothing to subscribe to. Your drives, your footage, your fault codes and your car’s paperwork are stored on the phone in the app’s own database. Here is the whole list of what does and doesn’t leave it.
Footage, trips, scores and records — stay on the phone
Written to local storage and never uploaded anywhere on their own.
Voice commands — stay on the phone
Speech recognition is on‑device by preference, so it works without signal and nothing said in the car is sent away.
Anything you share — goes where you send it
A clip you export, a mileage report you email, a drive you upload. Each one is an action you take.
Place names — a lookup, when online
Turning a trip’s start and end into readable place names uses a geocoding lookup, and falls back to offline results when there is no signal.
The AI explanation — only if you configure it
Fault-code and health explanations go to an Azure OpenAI endpoint you supply yourself, with the car’s description, its codes and its readings. No key, no calls — and the rest of the app is unaffected.
Get Shiny Dash
Put it on the windscreen.
Free to install. Everything except the engine data works with nothing but the phone in the cradle — add a Bluetooth OBD‑II dongle when you want the car to talk back.
iPhone & AndroidCarPlay & Android Auto
OBD‑II BLE dongle optionalNo account