The message that changed how we built Hawk

Why the dashboard wasn't enough

Marcus drove nights in London. He'd installed Hawk on his dashboard after a passenger dispute over a fare went sideways. The video saved him, but it only showed the road. What happened in the cabin was still his word against theirs.

He wasn't alone. Within weeks of launch, we started hearing the same question from drivers using Lyft, Bolt, and Uber. The front-facing camera had solved one problem, but it left another untouched. Passengers can claim injury, theft, or misconduct inside the vehicle. A driver with only forward-facing footage is still vulnerable.

We realised something: the feature request wasn't really about surveillance. It was about asymmetry. Passengers have rights. Drivers needed the same protection, recorded fairly and legally. That's when the cabin camera stopped being "nice to have" and became essential.

Building it meant learning what drivers actually needed

We spent six weeks talking to rideshare drivers before we wrote a single line of code. Not designers talking to drivers. Engineers and I talking to drivers. Sitting in cars. Asking questions.

What we learned shifted everything. Drivers didn't want a separate device. They didn't want a subscription that locked them into monthly payments. They wanted clarity on the legal side. Most of all, they wanted a way to hand over evidence that police and courts would accept without argument.

That conversation shaped what became Rideshare Pro. The cabin camera works alongside the road-facing one, recording both angles simultaneously. Both feeds include SHA-256 integrity hashes on every clip. When you export a dispute, you're not sending a video file and hoping someone believes it's real. You're sending a verified, court-ready ZIP archive with a SHA-256 manifest proving the footage hasn't been edited or tampered with.

The passenger notice requirement under UK law was non-negotiable. We built it into the shift mode so drivers can enable recording across multiple trips, and the app displays a clear cabin-recording notice automatically. No grey area. No assumption.

One-tap export for people under pressure

Here's the part that mattered most to Marcus and the drivers we talked to. When something goes wrong, you're not thinking clearly. You're angry, or scared, or both. You need to send your evidence to insurance or police, and you need to do it right now.

We built the dispute export so it takes one tap. Your Hawk app generates a ZIP file with every relevant clip, a manifest showing the SHA-256 hash of each one, GPS data if you've enabled it, and metadata that proves integrity. You send it to your insurance company, the police, or if it comes to it, small-claims court. No explaining how you filmed it. No arguing about whether the file's been edited. The hash proves it.

That was the real feature. Not the cabin camera hardware. Not the recording. The ability to hand someone proof they can't argue with.

Why it had to be part of Rideshare Pro, not free

We knew cabin camera would put more weight on the app. More recording, more battery, more storage. The free tier stays lean because we wanted anyone to try Hawk without friction. Ten clips a month, seven-day retention, proof of concept. That's honest.

But cabin recording changes the math. Drivers doing this work deserve proper tools, and proper tools have a cost. Rideshare Pro is £8.99 a month or £69.99 a year. It includes both cameras, shift mode for multi-trip sessions, biometric-locked evidence locker, and iCloud sync so your locked Pro clips back up automatically. You also get Siri Shortcuts and voice-save commands, so you can trigger recording with voice alone if you're in a difficult moment.

Marcus subscribes to Rideshare Pro. So do hundreds of other drivers now. They're not paying for a subscription to feel safe. They're paying for tools that actually work when it matters.

What we didn't build, and why

We deliberately stayed away from fleet tracking, cloud auto-upload, or anything that turns Hawk into a surveillance tool. This is your phone, your clips, your evidence locker. We don't harvest your drive data. We don't sell your routes to delivery platforms. Pro clips sync to your own iCloud, not our servers.

That choice was partly principle. Partly practical. Drivers need to trust that their tool isn't collecting data about them. Insurance companies don't need to know where you drive. Police don't need a backdoor into your app.

We also didn't build a connected hardware dashcam because drivers told us they didn't want another device in their life. Another bracket, another power cable, another app. One phone. One tool. Done.