Hi everyone!
I’m developing an employee time-tracking app in Glide, where employees are only allowed to clock in if they are physically at their designated workplace.
I’m using the native integration with Radar, setting up the Radar - Track Once action, and I have connected the API Key successfully. However, I’ve noticed that the location returned by both Glide and Radar is not precise enough — sometimes it deviates by several meters, or even kilometers, especially indoors.
This makes it very difficult to guarantee that the user is actually at their designated workplace when clocking in.
Has anyone else worked with this integration and faced similar issues?
Is there any way to improve the location accuracy when using Radar in Glide?
Any experience, advice, or tips would be greatly appreciated! 
Thanks in advance!
You don’t need the Radar integration for this, you can use the native “Distance from Location” column. It works well enough, as long as you have accurate location coordinates for your designated workplace.
I have used it with a similar time tracking App, and we have a minimum distance set of 50 metres, and it works perfectly well.
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Hi Darren, thank you so much for your response.
In my case, even though I’m using the exact coordinates from Google Maps, the accuracy is inconsistent. Sometimes the location is detected correctly, but other times—while standing in exactly the same spot—the app tells me I’m more than 2 km away. If I use other tools to get the location, like Glide’s location feature or Radar, the results still vary, and the error can sometimes exceed 5 km.
I understand that location accuracy can vary depending on the device, but… that much?
I’m concerned because I don’t want users to run into issues when trying to clock in or out of their shifts due to this kind of inaccuracy.
Have you experienced this issue?
If so, how did you solve it?
No, I haven’t. In the App I mentioned, we’ve have around 150 users clocking in and out daily for about the past 18 months, and to be honest I don’t recall a single instance where the location accuracy wasn’t good enough. As I mentioned, we have it set to a minimum distance of 50m.
I really don’t know what could be causing the behaviour you’ve been observing, sorry.
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Is this a problem with certain devices, or does it just vary in general on all devices?
I feel like the problem could be a couple things.
- The app may not have permission for precise location, so it only provides a general location based on a cell tower or IP address instead of GPS.
- Or, it’s a matter of timing. GPS takes a little bit to lock in a precise location. I have to wonder if the Glide location switch or the radar option allow enough time to lock in an accurate location.
By using a distance column instead, the GPS is at least kept active because the distance constantly updates instead of recording only once like Glide’s location switch does (and probably the radar integration as well). Meaning there is adequate time to lock in a precise location to determine that distance.
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A few months ago I built a feature that was referencing lat-long coordinates and calculating distances. The feature also filtered a list of locations based on distances from the user.
The feature was not particularly complicated but it wasn’t working reliably. When I placed one device at coordinates xyz I would see 36 locations within 10km let’s say, and when I placed another device at the exact same coordinates xyz I would see 4 locations within the same 10km radius. It was a little disconcerting.
When debugging, I noticed that the issue would resolve when the locale of the device or browser was changed (from FR to EN). And then I noticed the obvious, that the separator in the latitudes and longitudes changed from a comma to a period. That was breaking everything.
I cannot remember now if I ever resolved the issue, changed the feature or simply gave up, but I do remember that an issue with commas and periods was the source of my distance bug.
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