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How One Developer Built a Battery-Efficient Geofencing App to Auto-Silence Phones

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A developer built a location-aware Android app called Muffle after a library embarrassment caused by forgetting to silence their phone. The core challenge was detecting location changes without draining the battery, which ruled out constant GPS polling via LocationManager. The solution was Google Play Services' GeofencingClient, which offloads geofence monitoring to the OS and only wakes the app when a boundary is crossed. To handle transitions reliably, the developer used a PendingIntent paired with a JobIntentService, ensuring tasks are queued even if the app process is killed. Testing revealed that a 50-meter geofence radius was insufficient in dense urban areas due to GPS drift exceeding 100 meters, requiring further calibration.

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