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Comment by nomercy400 | Hacker News Reader

The fact that they can use the delay of the satellite signal to predict rainfall, is pretty impressive. It immediately links this app to more data for weather prediction, which might lead to better weather predictions.

I wonder how they would measure that on an android phone. Does android expose such low-level delays to the user? Is this not handled by a GNSS chip in hardware, or the OS driver/kernel?

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The idea is interesting, but there are some disadvantages of the app itself (see below). Maybe developers can read this and implement some changes.

- the phone should have non-obscured view of the sky. Thus having a phone charging and logging the data while it is on the desk inside a house doesn't work that well (red or orange indicator of the measurements quality, even near a big window).

- speaking of charging, there are no settings which allow to instruct the app to be dormant and automatically start recording when phone is charging.

- Account and login process is needed to upload the collected data. Why is it even the case? Can't the data be uploaded anonymously with just some unique phone identifier, or without one just relying on coordinates and other GNSS related measurements. Data can be cross-checked with others nearby and outliers can be removed just from that. There is no real need to know my name, email and create a leader-board or at least have an option of anonymous upload.

Hypothetically they could be using an account / login process to allow them to filter out measurements from devices that for whatever reason (hardware / environment / etc) to be sending low quality data. Alternatively they could have used device id without having the user setup an account but that actually feels more intrusive.

Not saying that is a reason but it could be one of the non-user visible rationales.

I too would prefer an anonymous option

They can do the same with a random 64 character identifier

If obstruction is static, such when one is charging the phone, it would affect absolute values but would still provide useful relative change.

Your phone may not be moving, but the satellites are. The obstruction is not static in that case.

My phone is charging from a portable battery just as often if not more often than a wall charger.

what if the device is charging while in a car/train/etc?

Then software can detect it's moving.

Here is an example of pretty stunning amount of visual detail provided by one of popular GPS data app on Android: https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/lT3TpHarUx89Z7HIf043aU... At least I can confirm it works will all navigation constellations on Samsung S10.