Battery, offline use, and background behavior

Battery

Bounded does not run GPS continuously. It subscribes to two signals your iPhone computes anyway for the system: significant location changes (movement on the order of city blocks, detected mostly from cell towers and Wi-Fi) and visits (the phone noticing you settled somewhere). The app wakes for a moment, notes the country, and goes back to sleep. Day-count tracking simply does not need navigation-grade precision — country borders are big.

Offline

Nothing in the counting pipeline needs the internet:

• location fixes come from the device and are resolved to countries with offline maps bundled in the app,
• the photo scan reads local GPS tags against the same offline maps,
• counters, history, and exports compute entirely on-device — there is no server in the loop.

A remote trek with no signal still gets tracked as long as the phone can see cell towers or record visits; truly signal-dead stretches behave like airplane mode (below).

Background and edge cases

• App closed? Detection still runs — iOS relaunches Bounded briefly to deliver location events. You do not need to open the app for days to count.
• Airplane mode / phone off — no location events are produced, so those hours are invisible to GPS tracking. A photo on arrival, or a gap fill, covers the crossing — see troubleshooting.
• Low Power Mode — significant-change monitoring keeps working; detection may just be a little lazier.
• VPNs don’t matter — location comes from GPS, cell towers, and Wi-Fi positioning, never from your IP address, so a VPN (or an eSIM from another country) has no effect on where Bounded thinks you are.