ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Alan Pope <alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Thomas,

On 29 February 2016 at 15:35, Thomas Voß <thomas.voss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 12:38 PM, Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> it isn't really about that, it is about providing less broken location data
>> to applications that ask for it. The current situation is that if an
>> application requests location data it gets given random coordinates of
>> somewhere you may have been to in the last week or so.
>
> Hmmm, I'm surprised by that statement. The service hands out the last
> known good location, together with a timestamp
> and the accuracy aged out. If applications fail to handle the
> respective data correctly, it is not the service at fault here.
>

I spent a week in Germany last week. At lunch time we wandered outside
from the exhibition centre and opened HERE maps to find a nearby kebab
shop (don't ask). Ogra pulled out his MX4 running rc-proposed and used
HERE to find a local shop and navigate to it. Our destination seemed a
ludicrous distance away from our current location, until we noticed
the current location on the map was actually the hotel we left some 5
hours previously. Cue a few moments of stabbing to refresh the app to
make it realise we've moved (quite a bit as it happened).

While this may be "Working As Designed", it's not "Working in a
meaningfully useful way". Having a location which is "aged" by over
half a working day is pretty useless on a mobile device. Other
platforms don't do this (in my experience), neither should we, battery
life be dammed, frankly. I want the map to show me where I am now, not
where I ate breakfast sometime in the past.

>> Then it thinks about
>> refreshing the location and refining it over the next few minutes or so if
>> the application is one that asks where you are again and again. If it could
>> take a peek at the satellites every so often then it would enable several
>> additional classes of application and would be less broken for things that
>> only ask once.
>>
>
> That's incorrect. The service keeps on delivering updates to
> applications that have requested continuous location updates.

Then there is a bug in the platform. The browser (in which HERE runs)
is a default app and the location service is also pre-installed. There
is an issue here which clearly need nailing as I'm certain we're not
the only 3 people in the world to experience this.

Cheers,
-- 
Alan Pope
Community Manager

Canonical - Ubuntu Engineering and Services
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://ubuntu.com/