Location alarm

My phone has a wonderful feature. If you set a time, my phone raises an alarm when that time is reached.

I use this for all sorts of things, including travel, cooking, taking naps, and pretty much everything else where I need to know that a certain thing has to happen at a certain time.

But my phone doesn’t have a feature that raises an alarm when I get to a particular geographic location. I wish it did.

I would use that feature, for example, when taking a train or a bus. Why do I need to keep checking to make sure that I am near my destination, when my phone has a perfectly good GPS, and could do it for me?

I suppose if it were easier to program phone apps that access your current GPS location, I would write my own location alarm.

5 thoughts on “Location alarm”

  1. I don’t know if you have an iOS device, but if you do, there are location-based reminders. If you create a new reminder in the Reminders app, there’s a Location switch which will let you set a specific location for the reminder to pop up in. There’s privacy and data collection implications to this feature that I haven’t thought through (because I don’t use the feature right now), but it exists!

  2. I guess that’s what I get for being an Android user. 🙂

    Hmm, I wonder whether you can use that feature and specify that you would like Apple not to remember your location.

  3. I recall my Android toting son setting location reminders (“Xyz when I get to school”) so it at least it used to work. As the previous comment points out, the feature may have been pulled for privacy reasons.

  4. I used to have an app that would send my wife a message when I got to the kid’s school in the afternoon. This gave her a 10-minute warning/head start for getting dinner finished.

    Unfortunately, it stopped working. After one of the updates, the system would regularly kill the app due to ‘battery optimization’.

  5. Hmm. I wonder whether “battery optimization” is a euphemism for “there were privacy issues.” Which would be funny because, you know, Google Maps. 😉

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