Battery and location accuracy

Why Circl asks for background location, and what it costs.

Circl needs your location in the background. An app that only knows where you are while you are looking at it cannot tell anyone you arrived somewhere.

The permission to grant

Choose Always, not "While using the app". With the latter, arrivals and departures only fire when Circl is open on screen, which in practice means almost never.

What it costs

Less than people expect. Circl does not stream your position continuously: it reports when you have actually moved, and otherwise stays quiet.

Battery alerts

When your battery drops to 20% or below, your spaces can be told, so somebody knows why you might go quiet. Two things stop this being annoying:

• It does not fire while you are charging
• It does not repeat every time the reading wobbles around the threshold

You can turn low battery alerts off in your notification settings if you would rather not share it.

Readings that look wrong

A position that is wildly off is usually a phone with a poor GPS fix, often indoors or underground. Circl discards readings it knows are too imprecise to be useful, so the usual symptom is a position that stops updating rather than one that jumps around.