Places and geofences

A geofence is a shared place, not coordinates typed into a node. Save “Home” once in Setup → Geofences, and every macro that references it follows when you move house.

Saving a place

The place editor is a map with a draggable pin and a radius. Give it a name.

Pick a radius comfortably larger than the accuracy you will actually get. A hundred metres is usually the smallest that behaves. A tight fence on a phone whose fix is kilometres wide at three in the morning is the classic source of phantom crossings.

Editing a place re-arms live macros, because a trigger reads its place only when it arms — so the change reaches macros that are already running.

The four transitions

The Geofence trigger points at a place and has four switches:

Switch	Fires
On enter	As you cross in. The only one that starts on
On exit	As you cross out
On dwell	After a delay inside, default 30 s. Use it to tell arrived from drove past
On staying away	After a number of minutes outside, default 30

Exit is the moment of leaving; away is the state of having been gone a while. The platform offers nothing that means “outside for a while”, so away is Easymatic’s own timer — started when the exit arrives, cancelled when an enter does.

With all four switched off the node registers nothing and can never fire. The editor warns about it.

The permission that fails silently

Two grants, and the second is the one that catches people:

• Location access;
• Location access set to “Allow all the time” — which modern Android does not offer in the first dialog. It has to be turned on in Settings.

Without the second one the geofence is never registered. Nothing crashes and nothing is logged, so it looks exactly like a geofence that is waiting. That is why the node badges itself in the Problems panel, and why the Permissions screen lists it.

Phantom exits, and what is done about them

Users of every geofencing app report the same asymmetry: exits are spurious, enters are not.

That is not about location quality. It is that you sleep outside the fence you watch — so when the platform re-derives your position after a registration and announces it as an ordinary exit, it can only ever be an exit. The process being reaped and resurrected all night by alarms is what makes it happen at three in the morning.

Three rules filter it, and they are worth knowing because they explain the behaviour you will see:

• Where you were is remembered across process death. The artefact fires because the process died, so an in-memory belief would be cleared exactly when it was needed.
• A fix wider than the fence is ignored, and teaches nothing — otherwise the next good fix would be judged against noise.
• A fix whose whole uncertainty circle falls on one side outranks what was remembered, so a genuinely missed arrival cannot swallow every departure after it.

The practical upshot: a fence needs a sensible radius, and a real crossing may take up to a couple of minutes to be reported. Android trades promptness against battery here and there is no setting for it.

Known limitations

• Arming a macro while already inside the area fires On enter at once.
• Arming while already away does not start the away countdown. Counting begins on the next return and departure.
• The away event carries no position — its latitude, longitude and accuracy are empty, because nothing measured anything.