In this paper, we study the problem of how to detect the current transportation mode of the user from the smartphone sensors data, because this issue is considered crucial for the deployment of a multitude of mobility‐aware systems, ranging from trace collectors to health monitoring and urban sensing systems. Although some feasibility studies have been performed in the literature, most of the proposed systems rely on the utilization of the GPS and on computational expensive algorithms that do not take into account the limited resources of mobile phones. On the opposite, this paper focuses on the design and implementation of a feasible and efficient detection system that takes into account both the issues of accuracy of classification and of energy consumption. To this purpose, we propose the utilization of embedded sensor data (accelerometer/gyroscope) with a novel meta‐classifier based on a cascading technique, and we show that our combined approach can provide similar performance than a GPS‐based classifier, but introducing also the possibility to control the computational load based on requested confidence. We describe the implementation of the proposed system into an Android framework that can be leveraged by third‐part mobile applications to access context‐aware information in a transparent way. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.