Location awareness is definitely one of the killer features of smartphones and it is a driver for innovation for many years now. And still building a high quality location based app is one of the most challenging tasks. This talk shares experiences in how to build a location-based mobile app fulfilling extraordinary demands in accuracy, reliability and power consumption at the same time. It will cover obstacles solved during 3 years of developing Familonet’s next-generation hyper accurate geofencing technology including some specifics of the location APIs of iOS and Android. In addition this talk will give an outlook for use-cases of location services and geofencing in particular. familonet_portraits_derkevin.com_kevinmcelvaney 7David Nellessen is co-founder and CTO of Familonet, a Hamburg-based start-up which has developed a mobile app for secure communication within families. Born and grown up in Münster, he studied mathematics at Freiburg University, focusing on Quaternionic-Kähler Geometry. At that time, he ran an agency for web development. After graduating with a diploma degree in mathematics and economics, he looked for new business models for product development and, together with Hauke Windmüller and Michael Asshauer, co-founded Familonet, a start-up that now has over a million users worldwide.

1. WE CARE ABOUT THE MOST IMPORTANT
CIRCLE IN THE WORLD
YOUR FAMILY.

2. David Nellessen
Co-Founder & CTO @ Familonet
Mathematician (diploma)
University of Freiburg
Hyper-Accurate Mobile Geolocation Apps

3. Seen on:
Supported by:
Intelligent Places
Real Time Location sharing
Emergency alert
Messaging & Photo sharing
WHERE ARE YOU
RIGHT NOW?
The Smart Family Locator

4. 4
REGISTERED USERS
85% viral & organic growth

5. WORLDWIDE USAGE
FAMILO is available in 14 languages
Frequency of check-ins in one single day
Available languages: EN, DE, PT, TR, ES, CN, RU, ID, AR, PL, VN, SV
TOP MARKETS
Germany
Brazil
United States
India
Turkey

6. WHERE ARE YOU?
Has Emma arrived at School?
Who’s at home?
Where do we meet?
WE SOLVE DAILY
FAMILY NEEDS
I’ll be running late!

7. REAL TIME LOCATION SHARING
Location Mode: VISIBLE
Where shall I
pick you up?
Oh great! He’s
on his way!

8. Auto-notifications when reaching
and leaving predefined locations.
5 check-ins per second worldwide!
INTELIGENT PLACES
Location Mode: PLACES ONLY
Has Emma
arrived at Uni?
Is dad still at
work?

9. SECURE MESSAGING
Location Mode: INVISIBLE
Who’s up for
pizza tonight?

10. 1-click emergency alert
to all group members.
PANIC ALERT
Just in case

11. A Driver For Innovation
Location Based Services (LBS)

12. Success Stories

13. When did it start?

14. Release of iOS 2.0
June 11, 2008

15. 8 Years Later
People still get lost

16. Challenges
⟩ Accuracy
⟩ Reliability
⟩ Power Consumption

17. Increasing Engagement
10
20
30
40
SEP
13
NOV JAN MAR MAY JUL SEP OCT
14
WEEKLY ACTIONS PER ACTIVE USER

18. How does a location determination work?

19. GPS
⟩ Accuracy up to 5m
⟩ Increases over time
⟩ Accelerated by Triangulation (A-GPS)
⟩ High power consumption
⟩ Only outdoor

20. Cellular Network Triangulation
⟩ Accuracy ≈ 1000m (roughly)
⟩ Reliability: Good reception
⟩ Low power consumption
⟩ Works indoor
Comparing relative signal strength from multiple antenna towers
Source: wrongfulconvictionsblog.org

21. Wi-fi Triangulation
⟩ Accuracy ≈ 60m (roughly)
⟩ Reliability: only in urban areas
⟩ Low power consumption
⟩ Works indoor
Crowd-sourced Wi-Filocation databases

22. Issue with Wi-fi Triangulation
⟩ Aps/Wifis can move
⟩ Leads to wrong location updates (error > 10km)
⟩ Common conference issue: Was the Web Summit really in Barcelona???

23. Wi-fi Triangulation on Android
⟩ Availability can be checked
⟩ Activation can be invoked
⟩ Wi-Fi scan-only mode since 4.3

24. Wi-fi Triangulation on iOS
⟩ Availability cannot be checked
⟩ Wi-Fi disabled à Bad accuracy

25. iOS App Switcher
⟩ Disables location in iOS 7.0
⟩ Location keeps enabled now (iOS 7.1 and
above)
⟩ Disables Background-Fetch

26. How to ensure good accuracy?

27. Make sure the user turns on…
⟩ Location Services (in background)
⟩ Cellular Network
⟩ GPS / “High accuracy” Location mode
⟩ …

28. Track Relevant User Settings

29. What is accuracy?

30. “We define accuracy as the radius of 68% confidence. In other words, if
you draw a circle centered at this location's latitude and longitude, and
with a radius equal to the accuracy, then there is a 68% probability that
the true location is inside the circle.”
Source: Android API docs

31. What is accuracy?
68% chance you are
within this blue circle

32. “A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter
for a real-world geographic area.”
Source: Wikipedia
Geofencing

33. ⟩ Auto-notifications when reaching/leavingpredefined locations
⟩ 97% of Familonetuser use family places feature
⟩ Number 1 reason for users to download FAMILO
FAMILY PLACES /
AUTO CHECK-IN

34. Our Experience with native Geofencing
”The app is not working. I was checked in at home 1km away”
- Tester of an early test version of FAMILO

35. Our Experience with native Geofencing
⟩ Urban Areas: Reliable with radius ≥ 250m
⟩ Out of town: Not reliable at all
⟩ Moderate power consumption
⟩ Non-consistent events (multiple enter events in a row)

36. FAMILO’s GEOFENCING
TECHNOLOGY
⟩ Smartly combines GPS, Wifi- and Celltower-Triangulation
⟩ Utilization of movement patterns and stochastic models
⟩ Improved location precision
⟩ Reduction of battery consumption
⟩ Unlimited amount of places

37. Conventional Approach
⟩ Constant Precision
⟩ Constant Frequency

38. Optimization
⟩ Varying Precision
⟩ Varying Frequency
⟩ Facilitating short term
movement patterns

39. Testing

40. GEOFENCING TEST SETUP
⟩ Real-world test courses
⟩ Circular fences with different radii
⟩ More than 20test devices (iOS and Android)
⟩ More than 200test runs over thepast 3 years
Small Test Course
Sophisticated Test Course
We track the exact time of entering and leaving each geo-fence and compare
it with the event time according to the Geofencing technology

41. Reliability by Fence Radius
An event is counted as successful if it is fired within the
given fence with a maximum delay of 6 minutes
Radius iOS Region Monitoring Familonet iOS Android Geofencing Technology Familonet Android
50 54,17% 68,18% 54,17% 87,50%
75 55,00% 71,88% 75,00% 100,00%
100 60,71% 84,62% 75,00% 100,00%
115 48,86% 87,50% 80,56% 87,50%
150 82,05% 98,77% 77,27% 97,30%
200 58,33% 100,00% 75,00% 100,00%
Measured on Small Test Course

42. Precision / Delay
We measure the delay between actual entrance and the Geofence
event. Precision is defined as the median absolute value of delays.
Measured on Small Test Course
150 meters
Radius iOS Region Monitoring Familonet iOS Android Geofencing Technology Familonet Android
50 00:00:26 00:00:24 00:01:23 00:00:37
75 00:00:29 00:00:30 00:00:35 00:00:27
100 00:00:32 00:00:19 00:01:09 00:00:31
115 00:00:28 00:00:30 00:00:43 00:00:19
150 00:00:19 00:00:11 00:00:49 00:00:23
200 00:00:16 00:00:26 00:01:01 00:00:39

43. THANK YOU
Visit us in our Hamburg office!
www.familo.net • @familo • david.nellessen@familo.net • @davidn_de