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Devil'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

Devil'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 ago
Yeah, 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 ago
  It 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 ago
You 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
    > 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. Then it should be open source, publicly verified, OR it should be sandboxed and have no network access at all.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mattnewton 10y ago

Yeah, 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 ago
It 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 ago

You 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
  > 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. Then it should be open source, publicly verified, OR it should be sandboxed and have no network access at all.