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Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

Google is fundamentally dishonest.

Example: my phone has both a Wifi and GPS chip. I open Maps and it tells me it can't give me navigation unless I turn on Location Services or whatever, which allows them to use the Wifi to scan for APs or whatever else they do.

It's 100% a lie, because any other GPS based navigation system (such as TomTom, Magellan GPS devices) can in fact do this; and they have far less CPU power than my phone does.

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The cold start for a GPS can take several the better part of a minute. Using WiFi or other information to get an improvement on the cold and warm start times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_first_fix

A relevant patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020142783

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/230305/warm-...

Background wifi scanning is unrelated to this. You're describing AGPS, and google maps doesn't even ask permission to use that. They just go ahead and use whatever internet connection is available to fetch that.

Can confirm, the maps app would ignore an existing GPS fix (obtained by osmand) and tell me it doesn't know where I am. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it insisted I permit it to track me first. Not sure what this depended on, maybe the app version, maybe whether WiFi was on... But indeed, I'd call it dishonest to claim not to be able to get a location when it is, in fact, available and ready.

That's not a lie, it's describing the way they wrote their software. Yes, they could have written it to use only GPS, but it's not written that way.

It is written that way. If you dismiss that prompt it goes away and works just fine.

it doesnt work just fine because google uses a dark UI pattern.

the maps app will show that warning every damn time gps is enabled. every. single. time.

Yeah I meant it works fine for that session. It is just a misleading/lying user nag.

As far as I understand is that "Location Services" is a catch all for wifi,gps etc.

But if you only want it to use GPS, then change Location Services from High Accuracy to GPS only.

Yes and everytime you open google maps it will bug you. It will say "turn on background wifi scanning if you want to use navigation". You can dismiss it and it still works fine! Because of course it doesn't need background wifi scanning for navigation. Oh and be ready to get nagged every time you open the app. They won't let up.

I see this sort of thing in software so often I gave it a name:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/dark-patterns-the-ratchet

There are many more like it but this one is particularly annoying because of the asymmetry between the work they do to get you to consent to something that isn't in your advantage compared to the work you have to do to reverse your decision (which sometimes isn't possible at all!).

Another example: I open Google Photos to look at a photo album someone sent me, and it tells me it can't function without access to my own photos. Untrue.

For a while I could still click no, but then they forbade that. So I gave up and clicked yes, and now they've got all my photos

google sold that one as a security feature.

instead of all apps with access to your sd card (virtual internal shared storage) having access to your photos, they created a secure photo storage, and apps can subscribe to it. they just happen to conveniently offer a bloatware photo app, shipped with every device just like internet explorer, that also happens to upload all your pictures to google servers.

gphotos is the first thing I disable on every phone (because you can't uninstall bloatware system apps). chrome is the second, because I must use it to download f-droid and firefox.

There are much more examples like these. And then at some point Google seems surprised people hate them. There is a huge contrast between the outlook inside G (we're an ethical company, still based on do no evil unlike the rest) and how others see them.

My android only nags me with that question when the GPS doesn't (yet) have a fix. It's still stupidly worded.

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