Locale X is the biggest upgrade for Locale ever, bringing the most requested features and a powerful new design, while continuing to offer the legendary reliability that Locale is known for.
Locale X has been through an extensive testing process, with 300 alpha testers providing feedback since 2018. After this extensive alpha period, we’re excited that Locale X is now available as a public beta on Google Play. Locale X is a separate download from Locale 6.4.0, so you can upgrade at your own pace. For more information, see our upgrade instructions.
Refreshed Design
The new Locale X overview screen
Locale X has a refreshed design, based on the latest Material standards. This includes a new icon and updated graphics throughout. And if black is your favorite color, there's also support for dark mode.
A new overview screen puts more status and information available at a glance. It shows when and why the app was last restarted, which situations are active, and which settings are currently fired. Plus intelligent new situation templates help you get more out of the app.
Performance has also been optimized. App startup time is more than 70% faster, with first launch faster than the blink of an eye. The interface is also now hardware accelerated for smoother performance. In addition, a number of subtle improvements have been made throughout. Calibration is faster to access from the Home screen. Situation reprioritization is smoother—just touch and hold on the name of the situation to drag-and-drop.
Cloud Backup, Restore, and Sync
Are you excited to upgrade to a new Android device? Now you can quickly bring your Locale X configuration to your new device too.
When you sign in, the app will automatically backup your situations securely to your account. If you have multiple devices, Locale X also keeps them synchronized in real-time.
Deep Android Integration
Enhanced support for VIPs through do not disturb
Looking for complete silence from all those spam phone calls and distracting notifications? Locale now taps into Android's Do Not Disturb functionality for even more control.
Worried about missing an important call from family or work? Locale X has support for VIP callers on the latest versions of Android. In addition to calls, messages from VIPs are also now supported.
The app politely requests permissions at runtime instead of at install time.
You can now hide Locale's ongoing notification with notification control on Android 8.0 Oreo and later. Find it by tapping the notification or looking under the "hamburger" menu.
A new Quick Settings Tile for toggling Locale on and off is under the Android notification pulldown area for quick settings.
Enhanced Conditions and Settings
Conditions and settings have stylish new vector icons that are razor sharp with different screen sizes.
Locale's built-in conditions have been enhanced. Calendar conditions automatically filter events marked as “busy,” as well as guide you to setup Outlook calendars. Location detection is optimized. Time conditions fire with higher precision. Face down detection is also faster and lower power.
During the beta a number of new conditions and settings are also being tested: The Headphones Condition detects when wired or Bluetooth headphones are connected. Use it with the new App Setting to launch your favorite music app when headphones are connected. A new Driving Condition detects being connected to a car over Bluetooth or Android Auto. And a new Display Rotation Lock setting can set the screen to vertical, horizontal, or automatic orientation.
New Architecture
Locale's most important job is to be practically invisible while working reliably in the background. Locale X has a powerful new system architecture to do just that. This new architecture is hardened with isolation between components to optimize memory usage, improve performance, and maximize reliability.
The UI and background service now run in different processes, which reduces memory usage up to 90% when the app is running in the background. Conditions and Settings have firewalls between them, creating isolation for high reliability. In addition, each Condition and Setting supports hyper-parallelism which helps distribute work across multiple CPU cores. This also allows Locale X to continuously monitor and optimize CPU and power usage. With all this isolation, we designed a new scheduler that allows Locale X to update contextual data more quickly, while improving battery life.
Locale keeps an on-device memory of recent contextual data, called the Context Continuum, which helps the background service resume where it left off and reduces the number of times it fires settings that are already fired. For example, when adding a new situation, settings in other pre-existing situations will not be re-fired. In addition, settings from previously active situations will not be re-fired after updating the app or rebooting.
Finally, the app has a new download format which is optimized for size to save you bandwidth and precious space on your Android device.
Easy to Use
In addition to being more powerful, Locale X is easier to use. A new User Manual provides step-by-step instructions on how to get started with the app, as well as tips and common troubleshooting steps.
New inline tips throughout the app dynamically help to get the most out of Locale. A few examples include suggested Defaults based on already configured settings, suggestions to disable “battery savers” based on device and Android version, suggested calibration based on current location accuracy.
We’ve also improved Priority Support, enabling us to more quickly answer questions.
Internationalization
Locale X fully translated in 14 different languages, to better support our users across the world. The app is available in English, Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Czech.
Hardened Security
Locale has always been secure and in Locale X we've made a number of advancements to harden the app further. The app now uses larger cryptographic keys, double-encrypts location downloads, and has additional integrity checks and cloud-based security monitoring for a more secure experience.
Plug-in API 2.0 Beta
Thousands of plug-ins have contributed to the Locale ecosystem. Today we're announcing an upcoming beta of a new plug-in API that makes plug-ins faster, more robust, and more secure while also supporting backwards and forwards compatibility.
The new plug-in API is already built-in to Locale X, and the documentation for plug-in developers will be made available in the coming weeks.
What’s Next
We welcome your constructive feedback during the Locale X public beta, as this is how we’re able to continue improving the app.
Please send us an email using Locale’s Priority Support feature under the Hamburger menu. (We don’t recommend leaving reviews on Google Play, because our reply is limited to Tweet length which is too short to troubleshoot anything).
In addition to improvements based on feedback, we have many great enhancements planned for Locale X.
We maintain a page of known issues that we are actively tracking during the beta period.