The Sealion 7’s screen is good at being a car and poor at being a computer. Its navigation does not know it is driving an electric car — it will not tell you what the battery will be when you arrive, and it will not put the charging stop in the route for you. It also forgets every drive the moment it ends.
Sealion 7 Pilot is the navigation app we wrote for our own car to fix that. It is free, it is ours, and the screenshots below are from the car — but this is still a source read and a look at the running app, not a season of driving with it. Read the Limitations before you weigh any of it.
What it does#
It is a driving app, and it is built like one: everything you need while moving is on the map screen or on the dials, in numbers big enough to read at a glance. The rest of the tabs are for when you have stopped.
Planning a route that includes the charging#
Enter a destination and the app does not just draw a line — it works out whether you get there, and where you stop if you do not.
It slices the route into stretches, asks OpenChargeMap what exists near each one, and keeps only the chargers inside a corridor around your route rather than anything vaguely nearby. Then it treats the whole thing as a shortest-path problem, where the cost of a stop is the driving time plus the charging time plus a penalty for going out of your way and for slow chargers. What comes back is the chain of stops that gets you there soonest overall — not the nearest charger, and not the fastest one in isolation.
The assumptions it plans to are deliberately conservative: leave each charger at about 78% — because the last fifth takes as long as the first three — and never plan to arrive anywhere below 5%. If it cannot find a route under tight rules (fast chargers only, narrow corridor), it widens them step by step rather than giving up.
The estimate accounts for the climb: a route over a pass is not the same energy as the same distance on the flat, and the planner weighs elevation rather than assuming an average.
What you see while driving#
During guidance the strip carries the numbers that actually matter in an EV, and they are live:
- ETA — when you arrive
- Distance remaining
- Battery on arrival — the percentage you will have left when you get there
- ΔSOC — whether you are ahead of the plan or behind it, right now
Arrival battery is the figure the built-in navigation will not give you, and it is what turns “can I make it?” from a worry into a number. It is recalculated as you drive, so a heavy right foot or a headwind shows up as the arrival percentage sliding down long before it becomes a problem.
Traffic is drawn on your own route, so slow sections ahead are visible rather than merely priced into the ETA.
ΔSOC: ahead of the plan, or behind it#
When it planned the route, the app worked out what the battery should read at every point along it. ΔSOC is the difference between that prediction and what the car actually has, at the point you have reached:
- Green — you are holding more charge than the plan expected at this point. You are using less than it assumed, and you have margin.
- Red — you are behind the plan. The motorway, the cold, the climb or the right foot is costing more than predicted.
- 0 % — you are driving exactly the journey it planned.
It is a small thing on screen and the most useful number on a long drive. Arrival battery tells you where you will end up; ΔSOC tells you which way it is moving and why, early enough to do something about it — ease off, or accept that the planned charging stop needs a few more minutes. It also quietly tells you how good the planner is: if ΔSOC sits near zero for a hundred kilometres, the estimate is trustworthy.
It appears only during turn-by-turn, because it only means anything against a plan.
When the traffic changes#
The app keeps checking whether your route is still the right one, and how often it checks depends on what you are doing:
| Situation | It re-checks |
|---|---|
| Slow traffic within 5 km, or crawling under 40 km/h | every 30 s |
| Ordinary driving | every 60 s |
| Motorway above 80 km/h with nothing slow for 15 km | every 2 min |
| Stopped for more than 2 minutes | every 2 min |
It also re-checks immediately when something meaningful happens: you finish a stop, you finish charging, you change the destination, or you leave the route.
What it does with the answer is the part we care most about:
- If the new route is the same road as yours, it silently corrects the ETA and the traffic colours. No pop-up, no interruption. Most refreshes end here.
- If a genuinely different, faster route exists, it asks. A card appears with the time saved and three choices — Take route, Keep current, or Compare on map — and a 30-second countdown so it never hijacks the screen indefinitely. The cluster shows a short banner so you know without looking down.
The distinction is deliberate. Being re-routed without being asked is how navigation apps lose your trust; being asked every 60 seconds is how they lose your patience.
When you miss a turn#
Missing a turn is treated as leaving the route: the app works out a way back onto the plan rather than re-planning the whole journey from scratch, and while it is repairing, the traffic monitor holds off so you do not get a reroute proposal in the middle of a recovery.
The map on the dials, and swapping the views#
The route also renders on the instrument cluster behind the wheel, so you can follow the next turn without looking across to the centre screen.
One control swaps what the two screens are doing: normally the cluster follows the car turn by turn while the head unit shows the whole route, and swapping puts the overview on the dials and the close-in view on the big screen. Both are driven from the same navigation state, so they never disagree about where you are or which turn is next — and if the head-unit side of the app is killed for memory, the cluster keeps navigating on its own.
This is also the least finished thing in the app. It uses a way into the cluster that BYD does not document, and a head-unit update could take it away without warning.
It remembers your driving#
Every drive is recorded — distance, consumption, how long it took — and every charging session with it. Recording starts when the car wakes up rather than when you remember to open the app, and the history survives a reboot.
The car already knows all of this. It simply never shows it to you twice.
It can install other apps#
The head unit has no app store, so the app brings a small one. The Apps tab lists packages held in a Google Drive folder — Aurora Store, Brave, ABRP, a dashcam viewer, Google Play services — each with its size and an ADB Install button that installs it over the unit’s own adb connection. It is the same path the app uses to update itself: Settings tells you when a newer version exists and offers to install it.
That convenience has a condition attached, in Install below, and it is the most important thing in this review.
Not finished: the camera and the assistant#
Two things are in the app but are not features yet — they are open reverse-engineering work, and we are listing them so nobody installs the app expecting them:
- 360° camera. We can bring the surround view up outside its normal parking trigger, but how the car’s camera system really wants to be driven is still being worked out. Treat it as an experiment that sometimes works.
- Voice assistant. The plumbing is there and everything would run on the car with nothing sent away, but it does nothing at all until you copy a 600 MB model file onto the unit yourself, and the behaviour around it is unfinished.
Neither is a reason to install the app today. Both are a reason to keep an eye on it.
Install#
There is no store, so it is a sideload over a cable-free debug connection — the procedure is in Sealion 7: turn on adb over Wi-Fi and install an app.
adb connect 192.168.1.20:5555
adb install -r sealion7pilot.apkCompatibility#
| Works on | BYD Sealion 7 with the DiLink 5 head unit |
| Checked on | Sealion 7, Morocco, head-unit build 51.1.4.2606220.1, Android 11 — read off the car |
| Needs Google Play | No |
| Price | Free |
Everything interesting depends on BYD’s own software being underneath. The app will install on an ordinary Android tablet, but there it is an empty shell — no car data, no cluster, no camera. Other BYD models and other head-unit builds are untested: what the app reads from the car was worked out by watching this one car, not from anything BYD documents, so a different model may show nothing at all.
Route planning assumes an 82.5 kWh battery. On a different pack the arrival figures will be wrong until that is made configurable.
Permissions and privacy#
The install asks for a long list of permissions. Most of them are BYD’s, and BYD splits car data very finely — reading tyre pressure alone takes two separate permissions — so a short list of features turns into a long list of requests. Here is what it actually means.
What it reads from your car: speed, gear, battery and charging state, range, odometer, tyre pressures, doors, lights, parking sensors, cabin air quality, and the car’s location. This is the data behind the arrival-battery figure, the dashboard and the trip log.
What it can change: two things only — the climate settings, and starting the 360° camera. It cannot unlock your doors, control the lights, or touch anything to do with driver assistance. Those permissions were not requested.
What leaves the car: map tiles, routing, place searches, charge-point data and weather come from outside services — Google, MapTiler, OpenStreetMap, OpenChargeMap and others. Searching for a destination means telling one of them where you want to go, and planning a charging stop means asking about chargers near your route. That is normal for any navigation app, including the built-in one, but it is worth knowing.
What stays on the car: your trips, your charging sessions and your settings are stored on the head unit and are not uploaded. There is no analytics, no crash reporting, no tracking of any kind in the app — we checked for it specifically.
Two things we would fix before calling it finished: the app currently allows unencrypted web traffic, and it allows Android’s backup system to copy its data — which means your recorded trip history could be pulled off the unit by anything able to run a backup. Both are on the list.
Limitations#
- It is version 0.1.0. One car, one market, one head-unit build. Expect rough edges and expect things to change.
- This review is not a road test. The screenshots are real, captured on the car with a route running while parked, and the source was read in full — but nobody drove a journey to write this, so nothing here promises a feature behaved well over distance. The cluster figure is still a placeholder — the cluster display was asleep with the car parked.
- The camera and the assistant are not finished features — they are reverse-engineering in progress.
- The cluster map may break. It uses an undocumented route into the instrument cluster; a BYD update could disable it.
- The planner is tuned to one battery (82.5 kWh) and to charge-point data that is only as good as OpenChargeMap’s coverage where you drive.
- Updates need the debug port left on, with the exposure described above.
- Nobody independent has reviewed its security, and it is an app that can install other apps.
Verdict#
The navigation is the reason this app exists, and it is where it earns its place. Routing that plans the charging stops into the journey, an arrival-battery figure that updates as you drive, a ΔSOC readout that tells you whether you are beating the plan or losing to it, rerouting that corrects itself quietly and asks before it changes your road, and the next turn on the dials — that is a genuinely better tool for a long EV drive than what the car ships with.
Everything else is either a convenience (the trip log, the installer) or unfinished (the camera, the assistant).
We are not giving it a score. A rating from us, on our own app, at version 0.1.0, without a proper test pass behind this review, would be worth nothing — and the rule here is that our app is judged on the same evidence as everyone else’s. It gets a rating when it has earned one.
Who it is for: a Sealion 7 owner who drives far enough to care about charging stops, is comfortable sideloading an app, and understands the debug-port trade-off. Who it is not for: anyone who wants something supported, or who would rather not leave a door open on their car’s network. That is a real decision, not a formality, and if you are unsure the honest answer is to wait.
Alternatives#
- The built-in navigation. Supported, updated by BYD, properly integrated with the cluster. It will not plan around charging, will not show you the battery on arrival or how you are tracking against a plan, and will not remember your trips.
- A Better Routeplanner. The reference for EV route planning, and it can be sideloaded the same way. It does not read your car’s own battery and consumption on this unit, so it plans from your phone’s picture of the world rather than the car’s — and it does not reach the cluster.
- Neither. Built-in navigation plus a phone in a cradle is the right answer for a lot of owners, and it does not involve leaving a debug port open on your car.