Saga’s an amazing app. But there will be times when it can’t get a fix on where you actually are.
This is usually for one of three reasons:
(1) Your sensors aren’t firing on all cylinders.
While GPS is an amazing technology, there are times when it will have trouble getting a fix on your current location. This often happens when you’re indoors, in a tunnel, standing under an awning, or are trapped in a Faraday cage, etc. While your phone’s GPS will rarely fail to find you, it can be pretty imprecise. Rather than tracking you down to a precise spot, it might only be able to identify the block – or zipcode – that you’re standing in right now.
Imprecise readings from a GPS can be bad news for Saga. We rely on accurate readings from the GPS to understand whether you’re sitting at home – or on the running trail a mile away from your house. If Saga gets bad data coming in, we may be unable to do much more than make a wild guess as to where you really are.
(2) You’re at a not-so-popular location.
You’ll find that Saga often prefers popular places to unpopular places when trying to figure out where you are. Hanging out at an obscure office next to a 5-star restaurant? Going to the dentist above a busy convenience store? Until Saga really gets to know you, it’ll think that you’re likely to go to the kinds of places that lots of other people go to.
Over time, however, Saga learns more about you – precisely in order to distinguish between the popular places you pass by everyday and the important (but less globally popular) places in your life.
Saga’s teachable, as well. Want Saga to “get” you faster? Tell Saga that it got your location right by hitting the Confirm button. And when Saga gets your location wrong, be sure to edit your location to where you actually are. You’ll find the next time, Saga won’t make the same mistake again.
(3) We don’t know about your location.
Saga knows about millions of locations all around the world. But there are also zillions of other locations that we know we don’t have in our database yet.
Some of these are “public” places, such as stores, playgrounds, schools, and offices. We’re adding thousands of new public locations each day from a wide range of data sources.
Other locations are “private” places, such as your home or that secret campsite you always go to on Memorial Day weekend. In order for Saga to find you at private places, you’ll have to create a new private venue in our database that Saga can use.
Here’s how to create a private venue:
- On your current location (or on an item in your history), tap the little pencil icon to edit.
- Choose ‘Create’ from the navigation bar above the map.
- Type in a name and address for your location, and tap ‘save.’
Private venues are just that — private. Saga doesn’t share private venues with anyone else.
Check out this video tutorial on how to edit your current location, for those times when Saga gets it wrong.