That’s something that is hidden from users, they put their phone in their pocket and two hours later their battery charge is substantially diminished. They don’t understand why or how to stop it.
They know playing a game for hours straight reduces battery charge.
It’s called cell tower triangulation and your phone needs to do it constantly, or you can’t receive or send calls.
The complaint about location in the article is about Google's tendency to bug you to turn on GPS and leave it on, happily draining the battery but for Google's own surveillance purposes. Having a GPS fix is not a requirement of the cell network.
Cell tower triangulation is something the network can do as a result of your phone connecting to cell towers. While connecting to a cell tower is mandatory for cell communication, an open baseband could make it a point to only connect to one tower at a time (although a single tower will still have some location information due to sector antennas).
Doesn’t mention GPS. That may be what the author meant, but certainly could be written far clearer.
Still, Google isn’t using GPS all the time, their power management strategy can’t allow that. It’s likely only using it when its deemed necessary. Android is tuned to balance offer users the most functionality possible with longest battery life. If it did not iOS would destroy it in battery life tests.
Triangulation is necessary to determine which tower to connect to and when to switch to a new tower. It’s why they are called “cellular” phones.
The entire point is that Google encourages you to leave the setting on, meaning you'll be doing GPS fixes more than what the user actually considers necessary.
> Triangulation is necessary to determine which tower to connect to and when to switch to a new tower.
No, it's really not. It's hard to even figure out what you're trying to describe here.
Yes, the baseband sees the signal strength from each nearby tower to know when to switch between them. But the baseband doesn't itself have a map of cell towers. If the list of visible towers is used for client positioning, it happens on the application processor. The work of deriving a location from the towers is not necessary for cell network communication.
And Google should encourage you to keep GPS on if they do a good job managing its power usage. Users aren’t always going to know when the app they are using is going to work better with more precise location data. This is a user friendly feature.
Circling back around, the author is still wrong that allowing installed apps to run unrestricted background network processes is anything like the OS carefully managing location accesses to minimize power usage.