What's New in ORBII: Live Circles, Safe Zones and a Date of Birth

The last few weeks went into the part of ORBII that runs between emergencies: your circle, the map, and the honest question of what we are allowed to know about you.

Here is what shipped.

Your circle, on a real map

A live dot tells you where someone is. It does not tell you whether they are okay. “Near the metro station” is a walk home or it is forty minutes of not moving at 11pm, and a single dot cannot tell those apart.

So the circle map now shows the day:

• Four members, four fixed colours. A circle holds four people, and each keeps the same colour every session, so four overlapping routes stay readable.
• The route they actually took, following real roads, drawn in their colour.
• How long they stopped, and where. Eight minutes at a bus stop is a bus. Forty minutes is a question.
• Their photo on the map, inside a ring in their colour.
• Distance from you. The row used to show GPS accuracy, which people quite reasonably read as distance. It now says how far away they actually are.
• Last known, labelled as last known. When someone stops sharing you get their last position with a timestamp, not a silent gap.

And at midnight IST, the whole day is deleted. Not archived, not backed up. An automated job removes it from our database. The purpose of your trail is to let people who love you see where you went today, and that purpose expires when the day does. More on why we chose one day.

Safe zones that know what time it is

Place alerts become noise the moment they fire when nothing meaningful happened. Two changes fix that:

Draw the real shape. Most apps model a place as a circle. A campus is not a circle, and forcing it into one means either missing half of it or swallowing three streets that are not part of it. ORBII lets you trace the actual boundary.

Set the hours that matter. Leaving the college gate at 4pm is a normal Tuesday. The same gate at 2am is not. Every zone can carry a time window, so the alert only fires when it is worth knowing.

Naming a place is now one tap too, with presets for Home, College, Hostel, Work, Gym and Friend. How zones work.

We ask your date of birth now

Not a tick box. An actual date, because what we are allowed to do with your data genuinely depends on it.

If you are under 18, ORBII will not track you. Rule 10 of the DPDP Rules 2025 forbids a Data Fiduciary from tracking, monitoring or profiling a child, and there is no parental-consent route around it. Circle sharing, location history and voice donation are switched off on a minor’s account, enforced in the app, and no parent or college can override it.

Every safety feature still works. Voice SOS, the SOS button, alerts to your circle and one-tap 112 are untouched. Locking a 17-year-old out of a safety app would have been the easy compliance move and the wrong one. The full reasoning.

Alongside it we added an append-only consent record. Every permission you grant and every one you withdraw is logged with the purpose, the notice version, the language and the timestamp. Withdrawals are recorded exactly like grants, because a record that only tracks yeses is not a record.

Voice Quests

ORBII is building its own distress-word model for Indian accents, and you can help train it if you want to. Short missions: say “help” in a quiet room, say “bachao” the way you would actually shout it, say “madad” with traffic outside.

It is off by default, never runs in the background, is adults-only, and you can withdraw at any time. If you never open it, ORBII never receives a second of your audio. Normal Voice SOS still runs entirely on your phone and uploads nothing. Why we are building our own model.

The app looks different

ORBII now uses the same palette as this website: warm ivory cream, near-black ink, one lavender accent. Floating controls over the map became translucent glass panels. Settings became grouped blocks instead of a long column of near-empty cards. Creating a circle is now four questions on a dark editorial ground rather than one long form.

Fixes worth naming

• Voice SOS false triggers. A distress sound alone can no longer fire an SOS; it now only corroborates a spoken word, and the confidence threshold went up substantially.
• The microphone staying on after you turned it off. Android could restart the service and resurrect it. There is now a hard off-switch it cannot get past.
• Sign out needing several taps. It was waiting on a network call before clearing your session, so on a weak connection the button looked dead. It signs you out immediately now.
• The map getting slow. Refreshes rebuilt everything even when nobody had moved. Quiet updates now cost nothing.

What is next

Finishing OrbiiKWSCNN so Voice SOS runs on a model built for Indian voices rather than a general-purpose one, more Indian languages, and the offline mesh relay.

If you want to help build it, we are hiring.

Download ORBII, free to start.