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I cringe when I see someone's phone and they have GPS turned on. I can't understand why anyone has it on 99% of the time. It's another service to drain the batt
by gdulli 10y ago
I cringe when I see someone's phone and they have GPS turned on. I can't understand why anyone has it on 99% of the time. It's another service to drain the battery and offer questionable value in exchange for tracking.
Maybe once a month I turn it on for a few minutes to get my bearings if I'm walking in an unfamiliar part of the city.
- saiya-jin 10y agomy lovely android phone tends to get it turned on by... wait for it... google play services, just out of blue. it even warms me that shutting it down may cause instability. pfff there were days when google was not this passive evil company. i guess over time and with such a growth, one cannot fully avoid it. more reasons to support smaller companies!
- Grazester 10y agoFunny. Mine never gets turned on automatically and never did. Whatever apps require it would alert me that I need it. As of late I have had my GPS permanently on. I like going back to my location history and seeing where I was at a certain date and time. I dont know why. LOL
- gdulli 10y agoThat's terrible. On my Galaxy S4 it never turns on unless I turn it on or explicitly allow an app to turn it on.
- on_and_off 10y agoDevil's advocate here : Awareness API. By making apps aware of your physical condition (are you walking, standing, running, at home, at work, etc ... ) we can make them smarter. For exemple : -don't notify me about the daily techmeeting when I am in another country in order to give a talk. -automatically start recording my run when I start running, not 10 minutes afterwards when I remember to open the app. It needs to be presented and explained to the users (actually the GPS permission is necessary for any detection tied to the user's location) but it can make apps way smarter. https://developers.google.com/awareness/ https://developers.google.com/awareness/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mattnewton 10y agoYeah, sounds like a dream for advertisers and not so much for users. This two examples certainly don't sell it over increased battery life and privacy for me. I think it should be opt in and I'm sticking with iOS.
- on_and_off 10y agoIt is very heavily recommended to opt in your users in this service (and mandatory to ask the user's permission for the location detection anyway, the most costly by far privacy & battery wise). I am not sure how legal it would be to collect this kind of data without asking for the user's approval first (not that it would stop all devs of course). Glancing at the doc, I might be mistaken, but it looks like on iOS, just like on Android, you don't need to ask a permission in order to access to the accelerometer.
- kuschku 10y agoYou can do the first thing just with cell based location tracking, offline, and no data given to any other service, no battery wasted. You can do the second just by checking for the significant motion sensor.
- on_and_off 10y ago>cell based location tracking, offline, and no data given to any other service Awareness uses cell based location tracking (along with GPS when necessary) And yes you can do everything here by coding it yourself, that's not the point of the API. The added value of the API is that it coordinates the requests of all the apps on the phone in order to poll the sensors as little as possible and allows you to create complex conditions (like walking OR in the park AND headphones plugged in) while balancing them for battery useage.
- kuschku 10y ago
- wesd 10y agoI can get to/from work four different ways. I want to know which way is the fastest. It gets tiring turning GPS on on/off every day just before using Maps.
- dredmorbius 10y agoThat is a conscious and deliberate UI/UX decision. It could (and should) be possible to specifically activate location services, or to otherwise indicate your location, when using an application which specifically requires it. For, say, 5 minutes. Or 15, or 1 hour. Turning this into a chore is just a cattleprod moving you along the gate to that chute dumping you in the "GPS always on" mode. I am hypersensitive to such manipulations, and take a hard turn in the opposite direction.
- Lordarminius 10y agoI use a Lenovo A859. You CANT turn off GPS permanently. By some algorithm it turns on by itself at intervals
- gdulli 10y agoI had no idea. I don't know how that's acceptable. Now I'm suspicious that mine is getting turned on without the phone telling me it's turned on.
- dredmorbius 10y agoWell, that's another strike against Lenovo. I'd been a customer for 20 years.
- PhantomGremlin 10y agoYou CANT turn off GPS permanently What country are you in? I don't understand the angst about GPS in the USA, it's unavoidable. It's part of recent cellphones, period. The FCC effectively mandates it!!! Read about Wireless Enhanced 911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanced_911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc... https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/911-wireless-services https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/911-wireless-services Basically, the only way to implement the more strict requirements the FCC mandated back in 2011 is use GPS. Given that it's needed for emergencies, it makes more sense to preemptively use GPS to at least periodically track location, rather than desperately trying to get a fix when an emergency call is initiated.
- jvolkman 10y agoWhen I walk into my local Home Depot, the top notification on my phone is a link to an interactive store map. I personally find that kind of feature both unobtrusive and incredibly useful.