Originally Posted by
Killa_roo Hi Leo,
Thanks for the reply, wouldn't GPS on its own be fairly accurate as well, or am I missing something?
Oh, provided you can get a lock on the satellites, GPS is EXTREMELY accurate (down to a few feet).... but... and this is a big but.... it is also a massive battery hog. There is nothing on your phone, in my experience, that can drain a battery faster than an actively polling GPS. It has to do several complicated calculations several times a second and that adds up fast. If your GPS was
active the entire time (i.e. leaving your GPS on uses no power until something uses it by the way) your battery life would be extremely short. Ask anyone who uses turn by turn nav on their phones a lot....
That is where network location comes into play... unlike GPS, there's no calculations needed.... your phone says "There's a hotspot called BillyBobsCrabShack nearby" or :"I'm connected to the XYZ2002 mobile tower" and Google says "Oh, we know where that is, here is your location". You see... those Google Street cars that drive around? Yeah, they also listen for Wi-Fi signals and catalog where they were at the time.... Google uses that, along with other shared location data to build a location database. It uses significantly less power than GPS because it's passive.... the cost is that your phone needs to be connected to a network and it'll wake your phone ( *** sometimes too often). It may not be as accurate as GPS, but the Wi-Fi location can get pretty close.... The mobile location (towers) could be 1km+ off since they pretty much locate you at the tower you are connected to.
The ONLY apps that should be accessing your GPS, in my opinion, are mapping and navigation apps.... OK, maybe an exception is a weather app like Nooly that is supposed to be able to tell you accurately if its going to rain in the spot you are standing in the next 15 minutes or so... but otherwise, everyone else should stay the hell away and use network location only. It SHOULD be baked into the Location settings to white/blacklist who can use GPS, but you have to load custom modules like App Settings Xposed to get that kind of control. But I've run across several weather widgets that ping my GPS
just to find out what town I'm in... that's a foolish waste of resources.
*** A note about Google Location Services' battery usage.... even though it uses LESS power than GPS, it can still use up a fair amount of your battery, but in a sneaky way. When your phone is off, GLS can still wake it up to poll for your network location... so apps like Google Now can use that to, say, tell you how long your drive home is going to take later... but waking up your phone all the time has a cost, and it could drain your battery 1% an hour (or more)... which can add up over the course of the day.... 20%, 30%.... Google has done a good job of reducing GLS's impact over past couple of years, but they could still do a few things.... like let me set how often it polls the network for my location (you need an Xposed module to do that now)
OK, I've blathered on an on enough....
Glad I could help...Thanks Leo, much appreciated!
