Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

This. Most phones make simple tasks like reading your lat/lon a PITA. You have to download a spammy 25MB ad-filled app that wants you to subscribe to some casino newsletter before you can read out your coordinates.

Personally I would do it with Termux and Python, but non-coders would have trouble using that.

Hell on the latest version of Android I can't even read my battery percentage without typing in some code (the latest update removed the battery % from the status bar). Everything has gone downhill.

View on HN

> 25MB ad-filled app

I really started noticing this since starting to use F-Droid, for a lot of simple apps in the Google Play Store, you can get the same functionality, with zero ads and a much smaller bundle size in F-Droid.

For example this app from F-Droid, which shows your GPS location & coordinates, weighs in at _48KiB_! https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.borneq.heregpslocation/ (disclaimer: I have not tried the app, it was just the first result that came up from a search).

It's pretty cool to see that yes, it's perfectly possible to build lightweight Android apps; and it's really a question of what you put in the bundle.

You can find a few open-source Android "GPS test" apps on GitHub, and ditto for other "sensor test" apps.

(I've always thought the terminology was a little confusing/imprecise, since I wouldn't consider these apps to be "tests", but rather simply the UI of a GPS receiver. Then again, when I hear "GPS" I think of a receiver-only, i.e. a device that just tells you your current lat/lon/etc. position, whereas I guess what most people consider a "GPS app" would more precisely be termed a "GPS navigation/map".)

On almost every phone you can turn showing battery percentage back on if you want it. What OEM are you using?

How do you get that info in Python?

pip install termux-api and then

    import termux
    termux.API.location()

Reply on news.ycombinator.com