ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Thomas Voß <thomas.voss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:27 PM, Royden Yates <royden.yates@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Monday, 29 February 2016 21:46:02 CET, Alan Pope
> <alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> 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,
>
>
> Thing is, HERE does not use cell mast locating doea it? Ithink I read that,
> but who knows if the source was credible.
>

It does use information about the currently active cell, but does not
consider all currently visible cells.
With that, we still get an initial estimate with a lower accuracy than
what would be available when considering
all visible cells.

> A cell phone with appropriate permissions and the modem enabled should
> always know at least the location of the mast currently servicing the
> device. Mine does not. Wihtout GPS coverage HERE tells me it cannot locate
> me. Unav thinks I am at an address I left over 6 months ago.
>

That is simply a bug, not necessarily in uNav but somewhere in the
stack a stale cached location is kept around.

Cheers,

  Thomas

> Regards R
>
>
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