am currently building an app that allows students to clock in when they arrive within our school vicinity by using current distance to track their distance to the coordinates of our venue. This is a critical feature because we allow students to clock in on their own via the app and the button has a IF function to only allow the action to log their attendance when they within range.
The whole app is already set up and the strange thing is that it works one day and the next, some students will have the "you are not within range’ error… But when I try to debug, it seems like the app isn’t reading the user’s current location even when we’ve tried everything (accepting the location prompt, turning it off and on again, restarting the phone, trying other browsers). This user did not do anything different from the last time he was able to log in.
So my main question is; is Glideapps’ current location reliable? It seems flakey and causes me to lose confidence building on this platform. Or is there something I’m missing? I feel like I’ve exhausted my know-how on this issue.
I think one step to debug is to add a text component to show the user’s distance somewhere in your app, then see if it displays the correct value on that student’s device.
@Jireh_Lee - have you submitted a support ticket for this?
I’d be curious to know what sort of response you get from Glide, as I’m in the process of building an App that will have very similar functionality. I haven’t noticed any issues with User Location so far, but if there is a reliability issue I would certainly want to know about it.
I would understand if they had never successfully been able to clock in that this setting was an issue, but the inconsistency is that they were able to clock in and 2-3 days later it stopped working.
Just as an update, it seems like the user’s phone had some discrepancies too. So for now our work around for those phones that seems to have location issues is for them to try different browsers until it works. Not sure if this is the best solution but it will have to do for now. Wonder if this issue would go away if Glide was an app on the app store or google play store.
For what it’s worth, I was testing with a client yesterday, and she kept complaining that the “Check In” button wasn’t appearing when it should have been (it uses a proximity-based visibility condition). After quizzing her, I discovered that she had the App open in MS Edge browser on her iPhone. I asked her to switch to Safari, she immediately got the “This App wants to use your location” prompt, and everything started working perfectly.
I noticed a while ago now that installing an app via the Ecosia browser on the phone doesn’t work great either. I now only trust two browsers for my Glide apps: Chrome and Safari.