It happened during a quiet Friday Jumu'ah prayer. The sermon was in full swing, the room was pin-drop silent, and then it started—the aggressive, rhythmic vibrations of a smartphone echoing against the wooden floorboards. Every head in the room turned toward the sound. I felt the heat rise to my face because it was my phone, despite me being the guy who usually prides himself on having a 'smart' setup. I had forgotten to toggle the silent mode after leaving my office, and that simple oversight turned a moment of peace into a source of public embarrassment.
That specific friction is what drove me to build Muffle. We all live in a cycle of manual toggling: silent before meetings, vibrate during class, back to normal at home, and then forgetting to revert the settings until we miss an important call three hours later. While Android has some built-in 'Do Not Disturb' rules, they often feel too rigid or lack the context-aware triggers that actually match our messy, unpredictable lives. I wanted something that felt invisible, something that handled the sound profile based on where I was, not just what time it was on the clock.
Building a geofencing system that actually works—without turning the user's phone into a space heater—is a challenge that separates toy apps from production-ready tools. The Android Geofencing API is the standard tool for this, but it is notoriously finicky. If you just naively register geofences for every single user routine, you hit the system-imposed limit of 100 geofences per app, which sounds like plenty until you realize that Google Play Services might decide to throttle your requests if you aren't careful with your PendingIntent usage or location accuracy requests.
