Location reminders
On this page
A location reminder fires when you arrive at a place or leave it: "Buy stamps" when you get to the post office, "Take the parcel" when you leave home. It is a reminder like the others, so it syncs, works offline and goes to the Trash with its task.
Add one#
Give the task a location with a point on the map first: a saved location, coordinates, Pick on the map or Use my location. An address alone has no point.
Then, under + Add reminder, At a place offers When I arrive and When I leave. Pick the radius, the size of the circle around the place: 100, 150 (the default), 300, 500 m or 1 km, or anything from 100 m to 5 km with the slider. The reminder reads "Arriving at Post office · 150 m". Without a point on the map both are greyed out, with Add a location… to set one. If the task links a saved location, the reminder follows it when you move the location's pin.
Where they fire#
Location reminders fire only in the Android app installed from GitHub or F-Droid (the Google Play version gets them once Google has approved the background-location use, and the iPhone app follows), after you turn on Settings → Notifications → Location reminders → On this phone there. In a browser or on a computer you can add and change them, and the reminder says Fires on your phone. Nothing fires in the browser and nothing is pushed.
Turning it on first explains what the location is used for, then asks for location access. Choose Allow all the time: with only "While using the app" nothing is watched, and the setting tells you how to change it.
When one fires#
- The notification offers Done, which completes the task, and Dismiss, which turns this reminder off on all your devices. Both work offline and sync later. Arm again in the reminder's menu turns a dismissed one back on.
- Every time you cross the circle in the reminder's direction it fires again, at most once an hour, so a GPS jump at the edge doesn't notify you three times.
- Several phones with the setting on each notify you; dismissing on one silences the others after they sync.
Privacy and limits#
- Your position stays on the phone. The phone's own region monitoring watches the places; the position is never sent to your server, never handed to the app's pages and never logged.
- At most 19 places at a time: phones watch about 20 regions per app. With more location reminders, the phone watches the 19 nearest and picks again when you travel.
- With end-to-end encryption, the places reach the phone only while the account is unlocked there; locking removes them until you unlock again.
- Calendar apps don't show location reminders (CalDAV has no matching alarm). The API and
ot task showlist them like any reminder.