Looking for Location-Specific Screen Locking Behaviour

Question

I'd like to have a feature that allows my Android phone to change its lock mechanism automatically dependent on location. For example, most of the time I use pattern unlock when out and about but tire of unlocking it constantly at my desk at work. Other solutions are:

• manually change to a slide lock while at work - but must remember to revert it back after;
• enable dev feature: no sleep while USB charging - but is a bit of a hack;
• there are likely other semi-solutions...

I'd like for my phone, when it detects my work zone for example, to require me to unlock using the current pattern lock only once and then automatically revert to a slide unlock thereafter, until the phone leaves the zone at which point it reverts back to pattern unlock for higher security.

Is there an app or configuration that supports something like this already?

Answer 1

As t0mm13b already suggested, Tasker can do that easily:

• Condition: [Location]
• Task: Keyguard disable/enable

For location, you can use different sources:

• GPS (most power-hungry variant, as it requires a permanent GPS scan -- but most accurate)
• network based (less power-hungry, but still requires at least WiFi -- but less accurate)
• cell based (least power-hungry, not to say: using almost no additional power, as the mobile cells are either used for telephony and mobile data -- but also least accurate)

You can even combine them: having e.g. cell-based combined with GPS would only start GPS scanning when the cells already match.

The trickier part will be the "require once" element, which will be doable with a more complex Tasker profile. If this is relevant to you, I will update my answer to include some hints on this.

Other (and easier to learn) solutions might be available as well, but I'm not sure whether they can control keyguard. So you might want to take a look at Llama - Location Profiles, which can at least handle the "location-based" part quite well. And of course you can check the "other users also liked" section for these apps on the playstore.