Simple In/Out Geofencing Gains New Features and Improvements

Simple In/Out’s most popular feature, the feature that put us on the map back in 2011, is the ability to update your status automatically via Geofence. Carrying your phone equipped with the Simple In/Out app is all that’s necessary to keep your in/out board up to date. We perform these automatic updates while respecting both the user’s battery life and their privacy.

Earlier this year, we shipped new features and stability improvements to our Beacon and Network system. These changes have been well received, and we’ve been working to bring those same improvements to Geofencing. Today we’re launching our new and improved Geofences for all our customers on both iOS and Android.

What’s changed? To be honest, everything! Geofences are now more intelligent, more reliable, and offer more control for administrative-level users.

Reliability has been improved dramatically thanks to the new system that underpins Geofences. We’re now smarter about retrying attempts, confirming you are indeed in/out, and differentiating between Geofences, Beacons, Networks, and devices. This increased intelligence allows us to make better decisions, which leads to better success rates with Geofences.

Administrators can now control both the status and the entire comment applied when an automatic update occurs. These settings allow for some advanced use cases we couldn’t cover in the past. We’ve also launched a brand new Geofence editor on simpleinout.com that is easier to use and easier on the eyes.

After updating, most users will see an increase in Geofence consistency. For users on iOS that are monitoring more than 20 Geofences, they will notice a new screen asking them to pick no more than 20 Geofences to monitor at once. Apple limits phone developers like us to 20, and while we were attempting to get around that restriction in the past, it came with mixed results. It wasn’t very reliable at times, and to make matters worse it required us to ask for more permissions that we really would like. Now we are playing by Apple’s restrictive limit (Android users can monitor up to 100 Geofences at once).

A special THANK YOU to our customers for the great feedback and to our beta testers for kicking the Geofence tires over these past several weeks. With the help of many around the world, we couldn’t be more excited to place this update in everyone’s hands.