Maybe once a month I turn it on for a few minutes to get my bearings if I'm walking in an unfamiliar part of the city.
By making apps aware of your physical condition (are you walking, standing, running, at home, at work, etc ... ) we can make them smarter.
For exemple : -don't notify me about the daily techmeeting when I am in another country in order to give a talk.
-automatically start recording my run when I start running, not 10 minutes afterwards when I remember to open the app.
It needs to be presented and explained to the users (actually the GPS permission is necessary for any detection tied to the user's location) but it can make apps way smarter.
I am not sure how legal it would be to collect this kind of data without asking for the user's approval first (not that it would stop all devs of course).
Glancing at the doc, I might be mistaken, but it looks like on iOS, just like on Android, you don't need to ask a permission in order to access to the accelerometer.
You can do the second just by checking for the significant motion sensor.
Awareness uses cell based location tracking (along with GPS when necessary)
And yes you can do everything here by coding it yourself, that's not the point of the API.
The added value of the API is that it coordinates the requests of all the apps on the phone in order to poll the sensors as little as possible and allows you to create complex conditions (like walking OR in the park AND headphones plugged in) while balancing them for battery useage.
Then it should be open source, publicly verified, OR it should be sandboxed and have no network access at all.
there were days when google was not this passive evil company. i guess over time and with such a growth, one cannot fully avoid it. more reasons to support smaller companies!
As of late I have had my GPS permanently on. I like going back to my location history and seeing where I was at a certain date and time. I dont know why. LOL
I'd been a customer for 20 years.
What country are you in?
I don't understand the angst about GPS in the USA, it's unavoidable. It's part of recent cellphones, period. The FCC effectively mandates it!!!
Read about Wireless Enhanced 911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc... https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/911-wireless-services
Basically, the only way to implement the more strict requirements the FCC mandated back in 2011 is use GPS. Given that it's needed for emergencies, it makes more sense to preemptively use GPS to at least periodically track location, rather than desperately trying to get a fix when an emergency call is initiated.
It could (and should) be possible to specifically activate location services, or to otherwise indicate your location, when using an application which specifically requires it. For, say, 5 minutes. Or 15, or 1 hour.
Turning this into a chore is just a cattleprod moving you along the gate to that chute dumping you in the "GPS always on" mode.
I am hypersensitive to such manipulations, and take a hard turn in the opposite direction.