Tailwind Drive

You have about eight seconds to decide on an offer. The fare is on the card. The pick-up is on the card. The one thing that decides your evening — where the trip leaves you — you work out in your head, or you don't.

Tailwind Drive works it out for you.

HOW IT WORKS

Set your Destination Point once: where you want to be when the day ends. Home, the gym, wherever you actually need to get back to.

Then drive as usual. When an offer appears, Tailwind reads the drop-off address off the card and compares it with your Destination Point. A strip appears above the offer:

• Take it — the trip brings you closer
• Skip it — it takes you the other way

It never covers the Accept button, and it disappears on its own.

A DESTINATION ZONE, NOT A PINPOINT

A trip that ends near your Destination Point counts as a match even when it doesn't end exactly on it — close enough to head there, or to keep working nearby. You set how wide that zone is.

BUILT TO BE READ IN A GLANCE

The answer is a green circle or an amber diamond. Never red against green: roughly one man in twelve has trouble telling those apart, and this is the one signal the whole app exists to deliver. So it carries the meaning twice — in the colour and in the shape.

Dark theme follows your phone, because most of a shift happens after dark.

ENGLISH, ESPAÑOL, УКРАЇНСЬКА, РУССКИЙ

A large share of drivers in the United States didn't grow up speaking English, and almost every tool built for them is English-only. Addresses stay American in every language, because the roads do.

WHAT IT READS, PLAINLY

To see the offer card, Tailwind takes one picture of your screen when an offer appears and reads the text off it on your device. That picture is never saved and never sent anywhere.

Two things Tailwind reads and uses leave your phone, and both go to Google Maps to turn an address into a point on the map: the drop-off address as text, and your phone's precise location. Nothing else it reads leaves — except a wrong-verdict report, and only if you read it and send it yourself.

No account. No sign-in. No ads. No analytics of our own, and no server of ours receives anything. Google's text-recognition library, which reads the offer card on your device, sends anonymous diagnostics to Google: device model, app version and performance figures.

ACCESSIBILITY SERVICE

Tailwind Drive uses Android's AccessibilityService API, and here is exactly why. The Uber Driver app does not make the offer card available to other apps, so the only way to see an offer is to notice that one is on screen and take a single picture of it. Tailwind uses the API for that and nothing else: to detect the offer card and to read the pickup address, the drop-off address, the fare and the trip time from it.

Tailwind never taps, accepts or declines anything in Uber, never changes a system setting, and never works around any Android privacy control. Every decision stays with the driver.

What the app does with that data: the screenshot is read on the device and dropped — it is never saved and never sent anywhere. The drop-off address and the device's precise location go to Google Maps to turn the address into a point on the map, so the app can measure whether the trip ends closer to the driver's chosen Destination Point.

Full privacy policy: https://www.merowingus.com/tailwind/privacy.html

IT NEVER TAPS ANYTHING FOR YOU

Tailwind does not accept offers, decline offers, or touch any other app on your behalf. It reads, it compares, it shows you the answer. Every decision stays yours.

HONEST ABOUT ITS LIMITS

Tailwind reads text off a screen, so it can misread. Treat the verdict as a second opinion you can check, not as a fact. When it isn't sure, it says nothing rather than guess.

This is early access. It works with Uber Driver on Android and reads US addresses.

Tailwind Drive is an independent tool. It is not made by, affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by Uber Technologies, Inc.

Profit Road. Every Drive.