Poll Location

Sometimes in response to a new threat or disruption, or if you have lost your phone, your monitoring team may need to quickly refresh their knowledge of where you currently are. Poll location is a feature that allows your monitoring team to automatically obtain your current location even when the app is running in the background.

In simple terms, Poll location is a feature that provides your monitoring team with an automated answer to the question "What is your current location?".

You can enable or disable this feature from Settings:

Whether or not the Poll feature is enabled or disabled, you will still receive a notification when your monitoring team polls your location.

Your monitoring team may follow up with a message to tell you why they polled you. You can also follow up with a message to ask them.

What happens to Poll location if Smart24 is not running?

Sometimes during day to day use of smartphones, a typical usage pattern would be to 'force close' apps in order to stop background activity of an app that might otherwise consume battery or cause distraction.

In the case of the Poll location feature, you will still receive a notification (for instance a lock screen notification) about the Poll location request even if Smart24 is not running. This is because the notification centre always continues to work, by design, even if the app itself is not running, as long as notifications are enabled for that app.

iPhone and Android users will have the following experience:

• iPhone:

Although it is not obvious from this lock screen notification, the best practice here is for an iPhone Smart24 user to 'swipe' or 'press' this notification. This will then open Smart24, automatically sharing your location as a check in immediately afterwards, as long as Poll is switched on in Settings.

• Android:

Currently Android Smart24 users will receive a lock screen notification saying 'SMART24 is OFF'. Tapping on this notification will cause Smart24 to reopen, but unlike the iPhone version, the location will not be automatically shared (even if Poll is switched on). The best practice here is for an Android Smart24 user to manually check in, in order to share your location.

What happens to Poll Location if you are not connected to the internet at the time of the Poll?

As soon as you connect back to the internet, you will receive a notification about a Poll request, and the Poll feature will continue. This also applies to the scenario in which your phone is switched off, or out of battery (and therefore not connected to the internet) and then switched back on again.

The team at Track24 are aware of the slight difference between iPhone and Android implementations, as well as the relative complexity of this feature. In future versions the feature will be improved to make it easier to understand, and more 'fault tolerant'.