MotoPin User Guide

This guide covers MotoPin 1.0.

Drop the MotoPin widget on your home screen, add its Quick Settings tile, or turn on its floating button — any one of them grabs your GPS location and saves it as a pin with a single tap, no need to stop, unlock your phone, and dig through apps mid-ride. Review, categorize, and export your pins once you're off the bike.

MotoPin is free for up to 5 pins. MotoPin Pro is a one-time unlock (no subscription) that removes the limit and adds trips, import, custom categories, more export formats, backups, multi-select, and the floating button. Pro features are marked (Pro) below; tapping one without Pro shows what it does and offers the unlock. You can unlock any time from the menu (⋮) → Unlock Pro, which also shows how many of your free pins you've used.

Contents: Ways to drop a pin · New pins: matching them to a real place · Review your pins · Search your pins · Trips (Pro) · Edit a pin · Custom pin categories (Pro) · Delete a pin · Select multiple pins (Pro) · Share a pin, or save it to your Google Maps · View pins on a map · Export your ride · Import pins (Pro) · Back up and restore (Pro) · Clear all pins

Ways to drop a pin

Pick whichever fits how you ride — you can use more than one at once, and they all save to the same pin list.

Home screen widget. Long-press an empty spot on your home screen → Widgets → MotoPin, and add the "PIN IT" button. Tap it any time during a ride to instantly save your current GPS location.
Lock screen widget (where your phone supports it). The same "PIN IT" widget is offered as a lock screen widget, but not every phone lets third-party widgets onto the lock screen yet — Samsung One UI's lock screen widget picker doesn't appear to list them yet. If your phone shows MotoPin in its lock screen widget options, tapping it drops a pin without unlocking (Pro).
Quick Settings tile. Swipe down your notification shade, tap the pencil/edit icon, and drag the "Pin It" tile into your active tiles. Now you can drop a pin from the shade without ever leaving whatever app is on screen — including Google Maps mid-navigation. Swipe back up to resume what you were doing.
Floating button (Pro). Open MotoPin's menu (⋮) and tap Turn On Floating Button. Grant the permissions it asks for (location, notifications, and "Display over other apps" — see below), and a small purple button appears on top of whatever app you're using. Tap it to drop a pin, or drag it anywhere on screen to reposition it — it remembers where you put it. Turn it off from the same menu item (now labeled Turn Off Floating Button) or from the "Turn off" action on its notification.

Any of these shows a quick "📍 Location pinned!" confirmation, and you're back on the road — no app to open, no screen to navigate. If a trip is running (see Trips below), the pin joins it automatically.

If GPS needs a moment. When your phone hasn't used GPS for a while (no navigation running, phone in a pocket or tank bag), the first fix can take a little time. MotoPin shows "Getting a GPS fix…" and waits up to 25 seconds — keep riding, you don't need to tap again. The pin is stamped with the time you tapped. If GPS still can't get an exact fix, MotoPin saves the pin at the best position your phone has and adds an "Approximate location" note to it, so the pin is never lost; when you resolve it later, choose Not listed — pick the exact spot on the map… to put it exactly where you meant. You'll only see "Couldn't find your location" if the phone has no idea where it is at all (for example, deep in a parking garage).

Turning on the floating button, step by step: the first time you turn it on, MotoPin walks you through three permission prompts in order — grant each one to continue: 1. Location — needed to capture where you are when you tap the button. 2. Notifications (Android 13 and up) — so you get the persistent "floating button is on" notification, which is also the easiest way to turn it back off. 3. Display over other apps — this opens a system Settings screen; find MotoPin in the list and toggle it on, then return to the app.

New pins: matching them to a real place

Every pin you drop starts out as a New pin — MotoPin doesn't ask you to name or categorize it in the moment, so you can mark a point of interest while riding past without stopping. Tap a New pin later (from the list or the map) to resolve it:

MotoPin searches Google Maps for named places within 1 mile of the pin (nearest first) and shows what it finds, usually within a second or two.
Tap a result if one matches what you meant to mark, or tap Search Wider to double the search radius (up to 8 miles).
No named place? The list also offers the pin's street address (📫, e.g. "Near 1290 US-33, Logan, OH"). Tap it to name the pin by its address, right where you dropped it.
If nothing matches, tap 📍 Not listed — pick the exact spot on the map… to drag or tap the exact location yourself, then give it a name.
If you'd rather not search at all, tap Keep This Pin to leave it at its dropped location.
Either way, you'll then pick a category (Fuel Stop, Scenic View, Campsite, Food / Rest, or Hazard — General is the catch-all) to finish resolving the pin. When the place you picked is obviously one of them (a gas station, a campground), that category is listed first, marked (suggested).

If Google can't be reached, MotoPin searches OpenStreetMap instead, which can take up to half a minute. If the search fails entirely (no signal), MotoPin says so plainly and offers Retry, Pick on Map, or Use Address rather than showing a misleading "no results."

Review your pins

Open the MotoPin app to see every pin you've dropped, listed with its type icon, label, timestamp, and coordinates. Unresolved New pins are marked as such — tap one to run through the matching flow above.

Search your pins

Tap the search icon in the app bar and type to filter the list by label, notes, category, or trip name — handy once you've built up a long list across multiple rides.

Trips (Pro)

Group pins by ride, so a weekend trip doesn't get lost in everything else you've ever pinned.

Start a trip before you ride. Menu (⋮) → Start Trip, give it a name (or keep the suggested "Ride – date"), and tap Start. From then on, every pin you drop — widget, tile, or floating button — joins that trip automatically. The app bar shows "● Trip in progress" so you know it's running.
End it when you're done. Menu (⋮) → End Trip. The trip's pins stay grouped under it. Starting a new trip also ends the current one; only one trip runs at a time.
Browse your trips. Menu (⋮) → Trips… lists every trip with its pin count. Tap All pins or Pins not in a trip to filter the list, or tap a trip to Show pins, Show on map, Export just that trip, Rename it, or Delete trip. Deleting a trip keeps its pins; they just stop belonging to a trip.
Group pins after the fact. Select pins (see Select multiple pins below), tap Trip, and choose New trip…, an existing trip, or Remove from trip. You can also change one pin's trip from its Edit screen.

While the list is filtered to a trip, the app bar says so, and the map button shows just that trip's pins.

Edit a pin

Tap any resolved pin in the list to rename it, add notes, attach a photo, and change its category (and its trip, once you have trips). Tap Save to keep your changes, or Cancel to back out. (New pins open the matching flow above instead, since they haven't been categorized yet.)

Custom pin categories (Pro)

Menu (⋮) → Manage Pin Categories → + to add your own category with a name, color, and icon — for anything the built-in ones don't cover (a favorite twisty road, a meetup spot). Custom categories show up in the Edit screen's category list and as their own color on the map. Deleting a custom category moves its pins back to General.

Delete a pin

Swipe a pin left or right to delete it. A "Pin deleted" message pops up with an Undo button — tap it to bring the pin right back if you swiped one by mistake.

Select multiple pins (Pro)

Menu (⋮) → Select Pins, then tap pins to check them. The bar at the bottom lets you move them into a Trip, Export them, or Delete them (with Undo). Tap ✕ or Cancel Selection to leave selection mode.

Long-press a pin in the list, or tap its marker on the map, to see its actions:

Edit (map view only — tap a pin in the list view directly to edit it)
Share — sends the pin's name, notes, and a Google Maps link through your phone's share sheet (text, email, whatever you pick).
Save to Google Maps — opens the pin's exact location in the Google Maps app so you can tap Maps' own Save button and add it to your personal Saved Places, Favorites, or any custom list. (Google doesn't give outside apps a way to write directly into your saved places, so this hands it off to Maps itself — one extra tap, but it lands in your real account.)
Delete

View pins on a map

Tap the map button (bottom-right of the pin list) to see every saved pin — or just the trip you're viewing — plotted on a map, with the view automatically framed to fit them all. Pins are color-coded by category — New pins show in Unbound Nomad purple until you resolve them. Tap a marker to bring up the same Edit/Share/Save/Delete actions as long-pressing it in the list (or the matching flow, for an unresolved New pin).

Export your ride

Open the menu (⋮) and choose Export Pins, then pick a format:

GPX — for Garmin devices and other GPS tools. Free.
KML (Pro) — for Google Earth or importing into Google My Maps.
CSV (Pro) — for spreadsheets.

Each one opens your phone's share sheet so you can save the file or send it to riding buddies. To export just one trip, use Trips… → the trip → Export; to export a hand-picked set, use Select Pins → Export.

Import pins (Pro)

Menu (⋮) → Import Pins and pick a GPX, KML, or KMZ file — a riding buddy's MotoPin export, a Google My Maps map (My Maps → ⋮ → Export to KML/KMZ), or waypoints from a Garmin or another GPS app.

MotoPin shows how many pins it found before saving anything:

Import adds them to your pin list.
Import as Trip groups them into a new trip named after the file — handy for a planned route's stops.

Only points become pins. Recorded tracks and planned routes (the line of your ride) are skipped, since one ride can be thousands of points. Pins already in MotoPin (same spot and name) are skipped too, so importing the same file twice doesn't create duplicates. Categories come back intact from MotoPin's own GPX and KML exports; pins from other apps import as General.

Back up and restore (Pro)

Menu (⋮) → Back Up Pins saves every pin, trip, and custom category to one file through your share sheet — save it to Google Drive, email it to yourself, anywhere. After a phone swap or reinstall, Menu (⋮) → Restore Pins and pick that file. Restoring adds to what's already on the phone; it never deletes or replaces anything. Photos attached to pins aren't included in the backup file.

Clear all pins

Open the menu (⋮) and choose Clear All Pins to wipe the list and start fresh for your next ride. This can't be undone.

MotoPin keeps your pins on your phone; read the MotoPin privacy policy for the details. Using MotoPin is covered by the MotoPin Terms of Service.