Smartphone security is critical to keeping your information safe. There are many different ways to unlock your phone, including fingerprints, pins, and patterns. But if you don’t want to do all that work when you are at home, you can use a feature called Smart Lock Trusted Places.
Smart Lock allows you to access your phone without the passcode in certain situations. Trusted Places is a feature that keeps your phone unlocked whenever you are in your home or another area where you spend a lot of time.
This feature is handy, but it can be buggy. If you’ve activated Smart Lock Trusted Places, but it doesn’t work correctly, here are some ways you can try to fix it.
Also read:3 of the Best App Locks and Lockers for Android
Drop a Pin
When you set up Trusted Places, you can enter your home by using your address. Sometimes that address is not 100 percent accurate and needs to be tweaked.
So while the address is something you should use, you should also drop a pin on your home to make sure the location is precise. Here’s how you can drop that pin.
1. Go to Settings.
2. Tap “Lock Screen or Security.”
3. Tap Smart Lock. If you can’t find the Smart Lock option, you can search for it by tapping the search icon and typing it in to find it.
4. Enter your pin to access this secure area.
5. Tap “Trusted places.”
6. Choose “Add trusted place.” If you already have your address added, leave it there, just add another.
7. When you see the map, check to make sure the red pin is indeed on your house, office, or whatever location you want to trust.
8. Zoom in and get the pin as close as possible by moving the map around under the pin.
9. Once the pin displays correctly, click Select this location at the bottom of the screen.
10. Save the location. You can change the name if you’d like.
To guarantee an even better response of the Trusted Places option, create four new places by dropping a pin at each corner of your home. This will make it more likely that the GPS will locate your phone within the borders of your home.
Choose High Accuracy Mode
Keeping your accuracy mode ow helps save battery on your phone but can affect the exact location on the GPS. To make your Smart Lock Location works correctly, you may need to set the location to High accuracy mode. It will drain your battery faster, but if you are at home, you can keep it plugged in when you’re not using it. Then the battery won’t die as quickly.
To set your phone to High accuracy mode:
- Open settings.
- Click Location.
- Look for an option for Mode or Improve accuracy.
- Set your phone to High accuracy or turn on both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to detect a more accurate location.
Check Google Maps
If your Trusted Places Smart Lock is still not working, check to make sure Google Maps is functioning correctly. Since Smart Lock relies on Google Maps to locate your device, if the app has an issue, it can interfere with Trusted Places.
1. Open Google Maps.
2. Click the GPS icon in the bottom-right corner and make sure the app locates your phone accurately. If it does not, clear Google Location History.
To clear the history.
1. Go back to settings.
2. Click on Location.
3. Scroll down until you find the Google Location History menu.
4. Select the account you want to use if you have more than one on this phone.
5. Click Manage activity.
6. Click the three dots in the top-right corner.
7. Tap Settings and privacy.
8. Scroll until you see the “Delete all location history” option and tap that.
9. Confirm that you really want to do this.
10. Go back to Trusted Places and test your phone to see if Smart Lock works.
Using Smart Lock Trusted Places is easy if it works, but if it doesn’t, you can still set up Face Unlock to unlock your phone.
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