It was 1:15 PM on a Friday. The imam had just begun the khutbah, and the room was filled with a profound, heavy silence. I was sitting in the front row, focused and calm, when my pocket erupted into a high-pitched, digital symphony. It wasn't just a notification; it was a full-volume, stock ringtone—the kind that cuts through stone walls. I scrambled to silence it, my face burning with embarrassment as dozens of people turned around. I had completely forgotten to toggle my sound profile before entering. That moment of pure social friction was the catalyst for Muffle.
We have all experienced this, though perhaps in different settings—a high-stakes board meeting, a quiet library, or a medical appointment where the sudden noise is both distracting and disrespectful. The core issue isn't that we don't care; it is that we are human. We are forgetful, and we are often preoccupied. Existing solutions were either too manual, requiring me to remember to flip a toggle, or they relied on rigid time schedules that didn't account for the fact that meetings run late or plans shift. I needed a system that understood where I was and adjusted accordingly, without me having to reach into my pocket.
When I started building Muffle, I knew geofencing was the answer. But geofencing is a notorious battery drainer on Android. If you ask the OS for high-accuracy location updates every few seconds, you will effectively turn your device into a hand warmer that dies by noon. I had to choose between the LocationManager API, which requires manual polling and constant wakelocks, or the Google Play Services GeofencingClient. I opted for the latter because it offloads the heavy lifting to the system’s location engine, which is optimized to use hardware-level batching. However, even with the GeofencingClient, the trade-off is latency. The system might take a few hundred meters of travel before it triggers an entry event to ensure it isn't triggering based on GPS drift.
