Why long-distance motorcycle riders are ditching their phone mounts
Motorcycle navigation has always been a patchwork of workarounds. A new generation of dedicated displays may finally change that, RiderNav reports.
Pull into any gas station on a touring route and ask riders how they navigate. You'll likely get wildly different answers. One rider swears by Calimoto, another keeps a sun-faded Garmin on the bars, and a third still unfolds a paper map across the tank.
Lately, though, those answers are starting to converge on the same kind of setup: dedicated, bar‑mounted displays that plug into the bike and the phone. The numbers bear this out. The motorcycle infotainment market reached $338 million in 2024 and is projected to more than double by 2034, according to IMARC Group, with other analysts forecasting steeper climbs still.
Much of that demand is coming from touring and adventure riders, the fastest-growing segment of the motorcycle market. But the market is still growing from a small base. In reality, most touring riders still clamp a phone to the bars, not because they love the setup, but because the apps are better than what most old GPS units can offer.
The catch is that the phone was never built for this kind of heat, vibration and sunlight. Once those limits show up, the setup stops feeling clever and starts feeling fragile.
In 2023, Apple told iPhone owners to stop mounting their phones on motorcycles. The vibrations, the company warned, can permanently damage a camera's optical image stabilization and autofocus. There is no fix. Apple did not say what prompted the warning, but years of complaints from riders who cooked their cameras on long hauls likely had something to do with it.
Most smartphones are also designed to operate below 35°C (95°F), a threshold that a handlebar-mounted phone in direct sunlight can exceed within an hour. Once it does, the phone chokes performance and the screen washes out, forcing longer glances and less time watching the road ahead.
In fact, checking a phone for directions is the single most commonly self-reported distracting activity while riding, ahead of phone calls, music or adjusting vehicle controls, according to a recent study.
Motorcycle simulator research has shown that even brief eyes-off-road moments cause riders to drift toward the opposing lane. And Colorado State Patrol data from 2024 shows distraction was the third-leading cause for motorcycle crashes in the state, with troopers logging 535 at-fault incidents that year.
In short: The case against mounting a phone to your handlebars is hard to dispute. But until recently, the alternatives were worse. Dedicated motorcycle GPS units were expensive, ran on static preloaded maps, and were often no brighter than phones.
The hardware is finally catching up. A new generation of motorcycle-specific displays now runs Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, with weather sealing and brighter screens built for direct sun.
Three things have made these new screens worth paying attention to. Chief among them is screen size. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommends that individual glances at in-vehicle displays stay under two seconds. While those standards were written for passenger cars, the principle applies even more urgently to motorcycles. The average phone screen, at handlebar height, rarely clears that bar.
Seven-inch models have become the industry standard, and for good reason: The larger screen offers roughly twice the usable area of a phone. This is enough for navigation, tire pressure, speed and fuel range to share the display without shrinking to unreadable sizes. In direct sunlight, shifting shadows or rain, it stays legible at a glance, where a smaller screen forces the rider to lean in.
Another is security. Earlier displays mostly bolted on permanently, an invitation to theft at every fuel stop. The category has answered with quick-release mounts that let a rider detach the screen in seconds and slip it into a jacket pocket. Snap it off for a quick errand, reattach for the highway.
Just as important, the new displays avoid the trap that turned older GPS units into dead-end gadgets: They work with the apps riders already use rather than asking them to start over in a proprietary ecosystem. And those apps have earned serious followings. Calimoto alone says it serves more than 3 million users.
Whether dedicated displays displace the phone mount in the way smartphones dislodged paper maps and GPS units remains to be seen. But riders at that gas station will likely have much fewer answers to the navigation question in a few years. For most of them, it will be a dedicated display.
This story was produced by RiderNav and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Copyright 2026 Stacker Media, LLC
This story was originally published May 13, 2026 at 4:00 AM.