The Rivian App Turns Software Into an Experience

What makes an app so special? It’s easy to take the low road here and say car apps on your phone are superfluous, have nothing to do with driving, and hey, get the hell off our lawn. Take a few minutes to mess around with most automotive apps, and you’d be justified to think that. As a rule, automaker apps just don’t do very much and don’t look very good. The Rivianapp, on the other hand, looks and feels like it was designed by someone with a passion for programming. More important, it’s packed with functionality that makes the Rivian experience even better. That’s why it wins our new big prize, a 2025 MotorTrend Best Tech award in the Automaker App category.

Begin with one of our key criteria: usefulness. Rivian’s app is supremely accessible, as Rivian took advantage of widgets, something no other automaker aside from Tesla bothers with. For example, right from your phone’s lock screen, you can see the battery’s state of charge (SOC). From there, tapping the widget will take you right to the app. Or instead of tapping, you can swipe right to the lock screen’s widget page, where you can add one of four Rivian button groupings with various degrees of functionality. Rivian allows you to do a lot—lock and unlock the doors, pop the frunk, turn on the HVAC, and vent the windows—without ever unlocking your phone. And once your phone is unlocked, you can have the exact same widget functionality right there on your home screen. 

When you eventually open the app, you’re treated to an increased level of functionality, which brings up another of our key criteria, the user experience. The first thing that strikes you, and you can see this on two of the four lock/home-screen widgets, is that Rivian took the time to color-code the vehicle rendering to your own R1T truck or R1S SUV. It’s a small, simple thing but one that points to a level of detail missing from the competition. Many OEMs can’t even code the color to the vehicle’s own screens. If you can’t remember if you plugged in your R1S last night, the image on the app depicts a charging cable hanging out of the vehicle’s snout to indicate you did.  

During the recent Los Angeles fires, it became apparent at about 4 a.m. that my family might have to evacuate. I’d plugged our truck in the night before but had only charged it to 70 percent, the R1T’s normal daily driving limit. A swipe or two on the app, and the R1T was now charging to 100 percent. (We ended up not having to evacuate.) That said, easily increasing the SOC was one less thing to worry about while in an utter panic. 

The Rivian app also lets you turn on the front and rear seat heaters, heat the steering wheel, or turn on the front seat coolers. You can also program all the above, including cabin temp, so your Rivian is in the condition you want it to be in when you climb inside. You can also instruct the virtual scheduler to pull power from the wall to maintain the SOC. More features: The Rivian app will open an R1S’ hatch and drop the R1T’s tailgate and either of its two gear tunnel doors. You can also launch a software update, schedule maintenance, add drivers to the vehicle via phone-as-key, plan a trip, see your vehicle’s location, and turn the built-in Gear Guard security cameras on or off. 

This leads us to innovation, another of our key criteria for the MotorTrend Best Tech awards. One thing we admire about Rivian is the company’s dedication to constant, substantive software updates, both for the vehicle and the app. The widgets we talked about earlier? They showed up in an update. As did, about a year later, a particularly cool feature that provides you with a live camera feed. Indeed, Rivian’s Gear Guard uses five of the vehicle’s onboard cameras (front, sides, and two rear-facing ones) to record events, be it from motion, incidents (like a quick swerve or stab of the brakes), or a driver-controlled dash cam. Via Live Cam, you can now pull up those same five cameras on your phone—we use it when our 7-year-old wants to play in the front yard where the truck’s parked. Pretty nifty.

Keeping in mind the criteria we use to determine the MotorTrend Best Tech winners—innovation, user experience, usefulness, value, safety, and privacy—and considering the Rivian app is free, it’s easy to see why this product wins an inaugural award. And with the rate at which Rivian pumps out high-quality software updates, don’t be surprised if this app wins again in 2026. 

More 2025 MotorTrend Best Tech Winners

Infotainment • Driver Assistance • Chassis Tech

Powertrain • General Excellence

Aftermarket App • Home EV Charger

Robotaxi • Public Charging Experience