Life360 acknowledged these issues, saying a bug was being fixed soon.Īside from bug fixing and location-conquering, Life 360 has gone back to those VC non-believers from when it first launched. However, there were some glitches with Android phones, in particular the HTC EVO. In our tests, we found the battery life actually did last while running Life360 in the background. “We did not mean to be a geo-company it was just kind of built out of necessity.” We’ve been offered even a few million dollars to do stuff with it,” said Hulls. “It’s the high level idea now, people approach us all the time. Hulls says the company is toying around with the idea of licensing the tech to those who don’t want to spend the time figuring out how to do it on their own. The company is likely not going to keep this one under lock and key. But if you’re a mobile developer, take heart. Hulls would not otherwise elaborate on how Life360 knows when and where you are when not in a geofence, saying the technology is proprietary. Because the Wi-Fi is moving with you, it makes the app believe you’re sitting in one place, but you really could be connected while on a moving train. The app gets tripped up if you’re connected to a mobile hotspot. However, Wi-Fi isn’t always Life360’s best friend. People do that for whatever reason,” said Hulls in an interview with VentureBeat. “When people turn Wi-Fi off, the performance is really bad. If your phone starts rapidly connecting to a bunch of different Wi-Fi signals, it concludes you might be driving or on a train, and thus on the move.īut that leads to one stipulation: the location technology simply doesn’t work as well if you don’t have Wi-Fi turned on. you’re likely sleeping and at home, so it ignores spurious location readings based on cell tower signals, which are notoriously inaccurate. Once you’re in motion, it will flip the GPS on - the only time your phone will actually take the big battery hit that comes with using GPS. If you’re sitting at work, it will shut off GPS and listen for signals that you’re changing locations. The same process happens when you’re in any known place. It takes data to know when you’re inside a geofences, but once you’re there, the company can use that information to make sure the GPS doesn’t get turned on. The company’s technology looks at a number of data points in addition to GPS to determine where you are: Wi-Fi signals, cell tower signals, and the geofences users set up. The biggest reason always-on location apps drain your battery is because it takes power for GPS to get an accurate read on your location.īut Haro, together with Chris Hulls, Life360’s chief executive, figured out that you don’t always need to have GPS on to know where someone is. It’s been fun to outlast them,” said Alex Haro, Life360’s chief technology office in an interview with VentureBeat. There were a lot of people there that were like, ‘Oh you know your acquisition is nothing … you’ll be gone in a couple days, like, look at Formspring, look at X random hot company. “We raised money back in 2009 when things were really, really tough. That may have been a discouraging way to start a business, but it lit a fire under the founders. In fact, it was so bad that in the first year of availability, Life360 got only 5,000 users, was turned down for venture capital funding, and got a bunch of bad reviews in the app store. “Does it drain my battery?” is always one of the first questions Life360 hears from potential users, and in the beginning, the answer was yes. With this service, Life360 could replace those ubiquitous “Where R U?” texts, allowing parents to know where their children are, and allowing children to get on with their lives uninterrupted, gosh. You can set up geofences around a variety of locations, such as your home or work, and it will automatically alert family members when you enter or leave one of those places. Life360 lets you keep tabs on the whereabouts of your family members. Location services aren’t a problem if you’re tracking an hour-long run, but if you want to use an app that tracks you throughout the day, you’ll probably find your phone runs out of juice far earlier than usual. That’s a significant step forward, because most GPS services are power-hungry.
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