An area you draw on the map around a place that matters, like home, your college or the hostel. When someone in your circle arrives or leaves it, the circle is told.

Why does ORBII use shapes instead of circles?

Because real places are not circular. A circle around a campus either misses half of it or covers three streets that are not part of it, and both mistakes produce alerts you learn to ignore.

Can I be alerted only at night?

Yes. Each zone can carry a time window, so leaving the campus gate at 4pm is silent and leaving it at 2am is not.

Safe Zones That Know What Time It Is

Most safety apps let you draw a circle around a place. ORBII lets you draw the real shape of a campus and tell it which hours actually matter, so alerts mean something.

Place alerts are one of those features that sound useful and then quietly become noise. Within a week most people mute them.

The reason is almost always the same: the alert fires when nothing meaningful happened. Fix that, and the feature becomes worth having.

Draw the place, not a circle around it

Nearly every safety app models a place as a circle: a point and a radius.

Real places are not circles. A university campus is a long irregular shape with gates on three sides. A hostel block sits inside a larger complex. A market street is a line, not a disc.

Force those into a circle and you pick your failure. Too small, and she is inside the campus but the app thinks she left. Too big, and it swallows three streets that have nothing to do with the campus, so arriving at a chai stall outside the gate counts as arriving at college.

ORBII lets you draw the actual shape. Tap the corners, follow the boundary, done. The zone matches the place, so entering and leaving mean what they say.

Tell it which hours matter

This is the part that changes the feature completely.

Her leaving the campus gate at 4pm is a normal Tuesday. Her leaving the same gate at 2am is a different fact entirely. Same zone, same crossing, completely different meaning, and an app that cannot tell them apart has to either alert on both or alert on neither.

So every ORBII zone can carry a time window. Set the college gate to alert only between 10pm and 6am, and you hear nothing all day, then you hear about it the one time it matters.

A notification that only fires when something is worth knowing is a notification people keep switched on. That is the whole design goal.

Naming a place is one tap

Small thing, but it is where people give up. Drawing the zone is the interesting part, and then the app asks you to type a name on a phone keyboard and you close it.

So ORBII offers the places people actually save: Home, College, Hostel, Work, Gym, Friend. One tap and it is named. You can still type your own if none of them fit.

Who sees what

Zones live inside your circle, and the same rules apply as everywhere else in ORBII:

A circle holds four people. Not a class, not a hostel block, not a campus. Four.
Sharing is opt-in and always visible. Everyone in the circle can see who is currently sharing. There is no hidden mode.
Today’s trail is deleted at midnight. Zone crossings are not kept as a long-term attendance log, because that is a different product and not one we are willing to build.
Under-18s are not tracked. Their SOS features work identically. Here is why.
Colleges get nothing. When an institution pays for student licences, that buys students the app. It does not buy a dashboard, student locations, zone alerts, or data of any kind. We do not build control-room feeds and we never sell ORBII’s data.

That last point is worth repeating because it is the obvious business model we turned down. An admin panel showing where students are would be straightforward to build and easy to sell. It would also make ORBII a surveillance tool the day after we shipped it, and every woman who trusted the app would be right to uninstall it.

Putting it together

A zone around the hostel with a night window, a circle of four people who chose each other, a map that shows the route and the stops, and a trail that is gone by morning.

That is a version of location sharing that a 21-year-old will actually leave switched on, which matters more than any feature on the list. Safety software that gets uninstalled protects nobody.

Set up your circle, or read how the map works.