PlacePing: Location Reminder

BasilBase

About this app

PlacePing gives you location-based reminders: it reminds you of something when you arrive at a place, or when you leave it.

Save the pharmacy, the office, your parents' street. Write what you want to remember. The next
time you get there — remind me when I get home, at the shop, at work — your phone alerts you — on the alarm channel, over music, once per arrival.

Most apps in this category fail quietly. They look armed and simply never fire, and you only
find out when you have driven home without the parcel. PlacePing is built around that problem.

It tells you the truth about its own state
Every reminder shows whether it is really armed. If the system has disabled it — a permission
missing, location switched off, Google Play services unavailable, the registration refused —
the reminder says so in plain words instead of showing a hopeful green tick. The Reliability
screen reads the state of your phone right now, not from memory, and puts the fix next to each
answer.

It puts itself back together
Android silently drops geofences on restart and after an app update, and it does not always say
so — on one phone tested here, switching location off and on produced no signal at all. PlacePing
registers these geofence reminders again on every one of those events, every time you open the app, and every six
hours as a safety net.

One alert per arrival
Not one every few minutes while you are inside. Not a sound that keeps going after you dismiss
it. Optionally, wait until you have actually stayed a few minutes, so driving past does not set
it off.

Features
• Alert on arriving, on leaving, or both — a location alarm for the errands you keep forgetting
• Every visit, or just the next one
• Active days and an hour range — outside them, an arrival is ignored
• Several places in one reminder, for every branch of the same shop
• Radius from 100 to 2000 metres, shown in metres and adjustable
• Alarm-style sound and vibration, optional spoken reminder, snooze
• Optional full-screen alert for the ones that matter
• Checklists that stay with a place
• Local backup you export and keep as a file
• Home-screen widget and a launcher shortcut for a quick reminder
• Nine languages, light and dark themes

Your places stay on your phone
PlacePing has no internet permission. Not "we promise not to upload" — it cannot. There is no
account, no analytics and no location history. You can verify this yourself in
the app's permission list.

What it cannot do — worth knowing before you install
• An alert can be a few minutes late. Android usually detects an arrival within two minutes,
and up to about six when the phone has been still.
• The smallest radius is 100 metres; below that Android misses arrivals too often.
• Precise location and "Allow all the time" are both required.
• Manufacturer battery managers can stop reminders, and an app that has been force-stopped
stays stopped until you open it again.
• At most 100 active places at once.
• Google Play services is required.
• There is no map and no address search, because there is no internet access. You add a place
from your current position, from a location shared out of a maps app, from a geo: link, or by
typing coordinates. Shortened map links cannot be opened.
• Chains are not matched automatically — add each branch you care about.

Published by basilbase. [e-mail]

What’s new

• Fixed: a snoozed "you left" alert came back as "you are at".
• Fixed: the widget, the home screen shortcut and tapping an alert opened the home screen instead of the right screen.
• Fixed: shared links did nothing while the app was already open.
• Fixed: a crash when a settings screen or the file picker is missing on your phone.