Your car's live data, on a dashboard worth looking at

One app, the whole picture

Plug a Bluetooth OBD-II adapter into the diagnostic port your car has had since the early 2000s, and RGB OBD reads what the engine computer sees: revs, speed, temperatures, voltage, fuel — live, many times a second. It is built for the landscape screen of an Android head unit and works just as well on a phone or tablet.

Everything is drawn by the app itself — no ads, no accounts, no tracking, and the whole install is under one megabyte. Start it from one screen: gauges, vehicle scan, adapter pairing, settings, and a demo mode that shows every feature with simulated data before the app ever touches your car.

Live gauges, fourteen designs

Animated tacho and speedo dials with readouts for coolant temperature, battery voltage, throttle, engine load, intake temperature, fuel level, boost and learned gear. Fourteen dial designs — plus a full-screen trip computer — switch on the fly with the arrow buttons, and a long-press on most readout cells lets you choose what that cell shows.

A proper drive computer

The Trip Comp design tracks instant and average fuel economy (L/100km), fuel used, trip distance and estimated range — using the car's airflow sensor when it has one, or a manifold-pressure estimate when it doesn't. It learns your gear ratios as you drive, and a standing-start timer arms itself whenever you stop: 0–100 km/h and 400 m times, with your best runs kept. Tap the trip to reset it or the timer to clear the times — the app asks before wiping anything.

Scan the vehicle before the workshop does

One tap runs the full standard diagnostic sweep: check-engine status, stored, pending and permanent trouble codes with plain-English descriptions from the SAE catalogue, the freeze frame captured when a fault was confirmed, readiness monitors, fuel trims, the VIN and calibration ID, and exactly which readings your car supports. Codes can be cleared from the app — behind a confirmation that spells out what clearing really does.

It reads the standardised emissions and powertrain system that every OBD-II car exposes — the same data a generic workshop scan tool starts with.

It watches the car so you can watch the road

Set up for your car, not a generic one

Pick your exact car — year, make, model and trim, from a catalogue of 16 makes as they were sold in Australia from 2000 on — and the app names it on screen and draws the make's badge faintly behind every page, as strong or subtle as you like. Gauge ranges, redline, engine size and tank capacity, alert thresholds and display scale are all yours to tune.

Every setting, explained

What you need

Two things: an Android device (8.0 or newer — a head unit, tablet or phone) and a Bluetooth OBD-II adapter. The app is built and tested with the Vgate vLinker MC+ Bluetooth 4.0 OBD2 scanner — a dual-mode adapter that speaks both Bluetooth Classic and BLE, so it pairs with head units and modern phones alike.

• Plugs into the OBD-II port — under the dash, driver's side, on most cars
• Bluetooth Classic and BLE — the app supports both, no cables
• Protocol is auto-detected, including older ISO 9141-2 cars
• Widely available online for around the price of a tank of fuel

Other ELM327-compatible Bluetooth adapters generally work too, but the vLinker MC+ is the one we test every release with and recommend.

A note on older, low-spec Android devices. Android 8.0 is the minimum the app will install on, but it isn't the whole story. The live gauges redraw continuously, and on budget head units and older tablets with little RAM or a weak GPU that can feel sluggish — gauge needles may stutter rather than sweep smoothly. Everything still works and the readings stay accurate; it's the animation that suffers. If your unit is slow with other apps, expect the same here, and prefer one of the simpler gauge designs.

Installing it

RGB OBD isn't on the Play Store — you buy it here and get a direct download link to RGB-OBD.apk, an Android installer under 1 MB. The link stays valid, so you can re-download it any time without paying again.

1. 1

   Get the file onto the device. On a phone or tablet, just open the download link on the device itself. Head units often have no usable browser — in that case download it on a computer and copy it across with a USB stick, or use the unit's own file manager.

2. 2

   Allow the install. Tap the APK and Android will ask permission before it will install anything from outside the Play Store. On Android 8.0 and newer this is granted per app: the prompt sends you to Install unknown apps, where you enable it for whichever app you're opening the file with — your browser or file manager — then come back and tap the file again.

3. 3

   Pair the adapter. Plug the OBD-II adapter into the port under the dash, turn the ignition on, and pair it from the app's Adapter screen.

4. 4

   Register in the car. With the ignition on and an internet connection, tap Register this app. It reads the VIN from the engine computer and unlocks everything. That's the only time it needs internet — driving works entirely offline afterwards.

What your car reports — and why a gauge might sit still

OBD-II standardises how a car answers, not what it has to answer. Every compliant car exposes the core emissions and powertrain readings, but past that the list varies by make, model, year and engine — two cars on the same showroom floor can report different things. The app can only display what your engine computer actually sends back.

So if a gauge never moves, the usual reason is that your car doesn't report that value — not that the app is broken or the adapter is faulty. No app can show a reading the car never sends, and that limit is the same for a $2,000 workshop tool.

Normal things that look like faults

• Readings that only move in certain conditions. Boost needs a turbo or supercharger and only climbs under load. Coolant temperature sits low until the engine warms. Some sensors report nothing at idle.
• Estimated rather than measured values. Fuel economy uses the airflow sensor when your car has one, and a manifold-pressure estimate when it doesn't — close, but it won't match the dash figure exactly.
• A gauge that works on one car but not another. Same app, different car — that's the vehicle, not the design you picked.
• A slow or clone adapter. Cheap ELM327 copies drop readings or refuse some protocols. If several gauges are erratic at once, suspect the adapter before the car.

If the scan lists a reading as supported and its gauge still won't move, that's worth reporting — contact us with your car's year, make, model and engine and we'll look into it.

Licensed per car — and one app holds your whole garage

RGB OBD is licensed to your vehicle, not to a device count. Registering takes a minute in the car: the app reads the VIN straight from the engine computer, shows it to you, and activates online. After that no internet is needed while driving — every connection simply confirms, locally and in under a second, that it's still your car on the other end.

More than one car? Register each licensed vehicle from inside it and the same app carries them all. It reads the VIN on every connection and switches by itself — plug into one car and its gauge ranges, redline, tank size and badge appear; plug into the other and its profile takes over. Nothing to pick, nothing to reconfigure, on as many devices as you like.

Changing cars? Deregister from the settings screen — the app asks for your new car's VIN and moves the licence to it on the spot, ready to register in the new vehicle. Transfers are protected by a device link created when a car is first registered, so only your own device can move a licence. The demo mode is always open, so you can explore the whole app before registering.

Licence, copyright & distribution

RGB OBD is licensed, not sold. Your payment buys the right to run the app for one vehicle, for good — the app itself, its gauge designs and its artwork stay ours. Here's the whole arrangement in three parts.

The full Licence & Copyright agreement has the detail, alongside the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Android is a trademark of Google LLC; Vgate, vLinker and ELM327 belong to their owners — RGB OBD is an independent product.