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Comment by novok | Hacker News Reader

I'm unable to try out the android app, since I'm on iOS, but one idea that would be cool is to set the accuracy of the shared location. Some people just want to share what neighborhood, city, or even what country / state they're in, or only share accurate location to a specific set of people.

Also another way to avoid using google / apple location services is offering a geoIP mode, which would mesh well with the optional rough location options.

It's too bad you can't force location services to only use built in GPS vs pinging their internet servers.

Apple also has an issue where they silently stop location tracking apps in the background, you might have to make a nag notification like arc app does do to keep it active. https://www.bigpaua.com/arcapp/

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> I'm unable to try out the android app, since I'm on iOS

I don't have a formal list set up for this, but if you would like to be notified of when the iOS app is ready just send me an email [arash at zood dot xyz], and I'll send you a reply when it's ready.

> one idea that would be cool is to set the accuracy of the shared location

Great idea. I hadn't considered that. Using geoIP mode would also be worth investigating. I've often found geoIP to be quite inaccurate when on cellular networks (e.g. reporting that I'm in San Jose when I'm actually in Los Angeles). Any thoughts about that?

> It's too bad you can't force location services to only use built in GPS vs pinging their internet servers.

My understanding is that on Android if you only use the platform location services instead of the Google Play Fused Location Provider, it will only access satellite positioning (GPS, GLONASS, etc.). It will also use up your battery faster, but I think that's tangential. So, at least on Android, I can code a path to only use location services.

> Apple also has an issue where they silently stop location tracking apps in the background, you might have to make a nag notification

That has been a real pain in my side on iOS and Android. So many deceptive apps have abused the location system for so many years, that Apple (especially) and Google are making legitimate use cases of background location very inconvenient. I can't say I blame them either.

It would probably be a power user option wrt to geoIP. Maybe add a tag to the location to denote that this isn't very accurate / a geoIP location. You could even detect if your on wifi or not to say if it's a cellular geoIP, so it's extra inaccurate or similar.

You could even go full original whatsapp and add a status string thing :P

> Any thoughts about [GPS accuracy]?

Unless I'm missing something, couldn't you just fetch the GPS location and truncate the precision to 1/2/3 decimal points? There are subtler ways of doing this that mitigate

A: Oscillation of a user on the border between X,Y and X,Y+1

B: Distortion of precision area near the poles

but I'm sure you get the gist.

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