Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrispeel | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a great proposal. Even so, I'm curious why there needs to be a formal process for the use of many sources in localization. It seems to me that anyone making a localization device (i.e. Apple or Samsung making phones) could add inertial information, cell tower locations, and more to give great location info.

View on HN

I was a little underwhelmed, myself. Apple absolutely does a bit of this now.

  Depending on your device and available services, Location Services
  uses a combination of cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS to determine
  your location. If you're not within a clear line of sight to GPS
  satellites, your device can determine your location using crowd-
  sourced Wi-Fi and cell tower locations or iBeacons.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203033

On the surface this sounds good until you realize that there is a pretty big group of people that started using iPads, etc. with boating navigation and charting app. Pilots too I think. Used to be you could tell when you had a location fix using a GPS, especially when I wifi was turned off. Now my iPad magically gets a location fix even when in airplane mode and I have no idea how or if I can trust it enough for something critical. This all started changing in iOS 8 or 9. Really wish Apple would expose more details to app developers on what type of fix an iDevice was using.

I couldn't agree more that devices don't expose enough detail about a GPS position. It sounds like you solved your problem, though. Airplane mode turns off cell and wifi radios, but leaves GPS alone so it's the only thing left to read position from.

I occasionally use an app called GPS Data on planes to check what speed and altitude I am are travelling. It has a tick indicator that flashes when update is received. It usually doesn't flash if I am too far from the window or can't get a fix.

The APIs provide enough detail:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLo...

Well, the article is scant on detail, but the posture seems to be not inventing something fundamentally new but rather unifying and standardizing the best of what people are already doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com