Watch the Day Back: ORBII Can Now Replay a Journey on the Map

A live dot on a map tells you where somebody 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. A dot cannot tell those apart, and a parent staring at one at midnight is guessing.

So ORBII can now play the day back.

Tap play, and watch the day retrace itself on the map

Open the circle map, tap the play icon next to somebody’s name, and their day replays on the map. A marker retraces the route they actually took. There is a scrubber you can drag, playback at 1x, 2x or 4x, and their speed at that moment shown as it moves.

The route itself is coloured: normal pace in one colour, fast stretches in another, so you can see the shape of the day without playing any of it.

Underneath: total distance, how long it took, average speed and the fastest stretch.

And the events sit on the scrubber as small marks, so you can see where the interesting parts are before pressing play. Tap one and the map flies there and the scrubber jumps to that moment.

The part most apps would not tell you

We could have shipped chips for hard braking, rapid acceleration, sudden stops and phone usage. Every driving-safety app has them and they look excellent in a screenshot.

We did not, because ORBII cannot see any of those things.

ORBII records one location fix every 60 seconds, or every 40 metres, whichever comes first. That is enough to draw where somebody went and roughly how fast. A hard brake lasts one or two seconds. At a one-minute sample it is completely invisible.

An app that shows you a hard-braking badge from location data alone is not measuring. It is guessing, and dressing the guess as a measurement.

On a family safety app that guess is not harmless. It is a parent deciding their daughter drives dangerously on the strength of a rounding error, and then having a conversation about it.

So ORBII marks exactly two things, because they are the two the data can honestly support:

A fast stretch. She covered this ground at this average speed. Consecutive fast segments collapse into one, because six chips for one stretch of highway is noise, not information.

A long stop. The phone stayed in one place for a while. This one is genuinely visible at a one-minute sample, which is precisely why it is here and hard braking is not.

Phone usage is not on the list at all. ORBII does not track it anywhere in the app.

Two small decisions that matter more than they sound

A short hop never produces a speed. A phone lying still on a table still reports fixes that wander by a few metres. Divide that wander by a short gap and you get an impressive number for somebody who is asleep. Any leg under 25 metres counts towards distance and is never allowed to report a speed.

The path is two colours, not a smooth gradient. A gradient would look better and would imply a precision that a one-minute sample does not have. The honest reading of this data is binary: a stretch either averaged above the threshold or it did not.

It only covers a week

Location history older than 7 days is wiped nightly, so a replay reaches back a week and no further.

Not anonymised. Not archived for analytics. Deleted.

And it only works while someone has sharing switched on. Turn it off and there is nothing to replay, for anyone.

Also in this update

Setting up ORBII went from 29 screens to 8. The old flow had a six-slide carousel, a language screen, a video, fourteen registration steps, a PIN and a five-step guided setup, built up over months by decisions that never met each other. Slide six of the carousel was titled “Two things and you’re set”, and twenty-three screens came after it.

The rule for the rebuild was one question per screen: does skipping this leave her less safe in the next five minutes? Photo, username, safe zones and evidence settings all failed it, and are now asked later, where they mean something. The last screen says “You are protected”, and nobody reaches it without actually being protected.

Permissions now explain themselves before your phone asks. Android will not stack permission dialogs, so the old flow was three system sheets in a row with no explanation attached to any of them. Each one is now a card that says what it is for first. You can skip any of them.

The community is free for everyone. It used to need ORBII Plus. A community is worth what its density is worth, and putting a paywall in front of an empty room guarantees it stays empty.

Circle members glide instead of teleporting. Fixes land every 60 seconds, so a member used to vanish from one point and reappear 400 metres away. They now travel there over about a second. Purely cosmetic, and it makes the map feel alive in a way that is hard to describe until you see it.

Still honest about what is untested

Roll call, survival battery mode, the escalation claims from the 1st, and everything above have been tested in code and not yet across a room of real phones on a real bad night. We will say so here when that changes.

Free on Google Play. The replay, the circles and the map do not cost anything and are not going to.