I'm not sure if this has been commented on yet but I haven't seen anything about it. With all of the discussions I see about turning location history and Google Now off I think this might be interesting.
If you have had location history enabled and are logged into Google and go to https://maps.google.com/locationhistory you can see what locations have actually been logged. Looking at my history, I can see why doing things like uninstaling Maps updates and restarting after getting the new Maps update has appeared to make a difference. When I first got my phone, Maps was doing a terrible job of tracking my location. It had me jumping a couple miles for a little while and then back again in real short intervals at times when I was staying still.
I eventually followed some advice to uninstall Maps updates. At that point it set my location to home no matter where I actually went.
Then I got the OTA update and it went back to how it was acting at first. No big surprise there.
Then I got the Maps update. It jumped a bunch between me being home and at work (they're only about 2 miles apart) but it tracked us going out to dinner well.
I then did a reboot to see if it would help with the Maps usage on my battery. Since then it's been tracking my location really well. I can see were we walked during the farmer's market Saturday morning, our family pictures (where I had my sunglasses stolen) to a party at a friend's house and back home, using the route we took. On Sunday I could see the trip to my parent's house, to the mall to buy new sunglasses and to Costco and then back home. Today it shows me dropping our daughter off and then that I've been sitting at work ever since, something it has not done (but I've done quite frequently) since I got my phone in May. This is all with leaving my location settings the same.
So long story short, if you have location history enabled I strongly recommend you go to that site to see how well it's working. I can see why some people claim many Google Now features are worthless if this is the quality of tracking it could be providing. If you don't have it enabled, it might be worth enabling for a little while to check in on how well the location services on your device are working. As far as I can tell it's by far the best debugging tool for these services that's available.
If you have had location history enabled and are logged into Google and go to https://maps.google.com/locationhistory you can see what locations have actually been logged. Looking at my history, I can see why doing things like uninstaling Maps updates and restarting after getting the new Maps update has appeared to make a difference. When I first got my phone, Maps was doing a terrible job of tracking my location. It had me jumping a couple miles for a little while and then back again in real short intervals at times when I was staying still.
I eventually followed some advice to uninstall Maps updates. At that point it set my location to home no matter where I actually went.
Then I got the OTA update and it went back to how it was acting at first. No big surprise there.
Then I got the Maps update. It jumped a bunch between me being home and at work (they're only about 2 miles apart) but it tracked us going out to dinner well.
I then did a reboot to see if it would help with the Maps usage on my battery. Since then it's been tracking my location really well. I can see were we walked during the farmer's market Saturday morning, our family pictures (where I had my sunglasses stolen) to a party at a friend's house and back home, using the route we took. On Sunday I could see the trip to my parent's house, to the mall to buy new sunglasses and to Costco and then back home. Today it shows me dropping our daughter off and then that I've been sitting at work ever since, something it has not done (but I've done quite frequently) since I got my phone in May. This is all with leaving my location settings the same.
So long story short, if you have location history enabled I strongly recommend you go to that site to see how well it's working. I can see why some people claim many Google Now features are worthless if this is the quality of tracking it could be providing. If you don't have it enabled, it might be worth enabling for a little while to check in on how well the location services on your device are working. As far as I can tell it's by far the best debugging tool for these services that's available.
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