Originally Posted by
SloButWide
If your phone's android there are apps that control other apps based on triggers. I had near field tags on my car phone holder and at work. Placing the phone in the car holder or work cradle triggered a mode specific to that location. Other apps trigger on location so you could have it start recording when you left home, and finish when you arrived at work. Back then I used "Trigger" - I've been IOS for years.
On android or IOS, you might be able to
use IFTTT to do something similar.
I had actually looked into IFTTT but it isn't immediately clear to me that I could customize it for my own "recipes" other than the canned options.
Another idea is using RFID on the bike, or a bluetooth trigger, so it's certain when you're physically on the bike and the phone would know that. That's probably the way to go if a software solution isn't satisfactory.*
The phone should be able to detect when I roll out of the house and into the parking lot without pausing - at a car for instance, and start travelling at 6-20 mph. It would be pretty clear that I'm on a bike. It's not quite that simple with exceptions, but using speeds and accelerations, location clues, and my own patterns it seems to me that detecting a ride, with beginning and end, shouldn't be all that difficult.
*It just occurred to me, reading your post about the holder in a car, you could even use a magnet in a case or holder to tell the phone where it is. As long as the magnet was located in a fixed position and your phone had the appropriate sensor. That wouldn't be a whole lot of extra hardware.