Troubleshooting

Follow these steps in order to help debug your situations.

1. Is the background service running?

If Locale’s background service isn’t running, then none of your situations will run.

Open Locale and check the Overview screen. There is a card which shows the status of the background service including when it started and why.

If Locale’s service isn’t running, the app will appear to “wake up” when you open it and you’ll see a message that Locale started when you opened the app. If this happens, most likely a “battery saver” or “memory cleaner” is stopping the app. These usually kill apps if you haven’t opened them for a few days, which can make the issue seem inconsistent.

Please visit our Battery Savers page for instructions on how to disable these on various Android devices.

2. Is the situation enabled?

Situations can be turned off by unchecking the “Monitor conditions and apply settings” in the Edit Situation screen. Please double check that your situation is enabled.

Disabled situations also have a gray dot in the situation list. You can tap on the dot to access another view to update the situation’s enabled state.

3. Are the conditions being detected?

If Locale’s background service is running, look to see if the situation is becoming active. A situation becomes active when at least one condition of each type in the situation is true.

Example: A situation has a Location condition and a Time condition, then it will only become active when BOTH conditions are met. If the situation is not becoming active, the problem is with the conditions. Some questions to ask:

• Do at least some of your situations work? That helps narrow down the issue to particular condition types.
• Does the same type of condition work in a different situation? For example: if a Home situation using the Location condition is becoming active, but a Work situation using the Location condition isn’t, then that helps narrow the problem down.
• Are there any warnings or errors listed in Locale? Open Locale and look to see if there are any warnings or errors listed on the home screen. Locale detects incorrect system settings that will prevent conditions from working. For example, the Location condition won’t work if location services are disabled or airplane mode is enabled.
• Can you try something simpler? Try starting with a single condition type and get that working, to provide a baseline to start with.

4. Are the settings being fired?

If the Situations are listed as active, then the settings will be fired when the situation becomes active.

You can see which settings were fired (and when) from the overview screen in Locale.

If you don’t see the correct setting listed:

• Is the situation listed as active? If the situation isn’t active, then the settings won’t be fired.
• Is the situation priority correct? If two situations are active at the same time, and they each contain the same setting type, then the setting in the higher priority situation wins. Check the priorities by opening Locale and going to the situation list. Situations can be re-prioritized by tapping and holding on the situation name, then dragging the situation up or down the list.

If you do see the setting listed, but the actual settings aren’t correct:

• Is there a timing issue? Sometimes slight timing issues can cause problems. For example, if you are driving to a location then the location will usually activate before you stop driving. (E.g. the Home situation might activate when you pull into the driveway, but before you turn the car off). Because of this, we often recommend putting the Driving situation priority above any location-based situation. We also recommend adding a volume setting to the Driving situation, because Android tends to change the volume whenever Bluetooth connects and disconnects.
• Are you using a third-party plug-in? Plug-ins are not made by the developers of Locale, so therefore may not always behave as expected. Try contacting the plug-in developer for support or try using Locale’s built-in functionality.
• Is your device blocking Locale? Some devices, like OnePlus, have a hardware do not disturb switch that blocks certain volume changes depending on the position of the switch. Likewise Xiaomi devices block apps from turning Wi-Fi on/off without explicitly going into the Android settings to allow access.