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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

When I saw the headline my first thought was “are those the European gps satellites?"

It’s not - they’re called Galileo - but it made me think: do modern gps devices only connect to the American GPS satellites or has gps become a catch-all phrase for all the different systems and do iPhone read location from both?

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>has gps become a catch-all phrase for all the different systems and do iPhone read location from both?

Modern "GPS" chipsets work with multiple SatNav systems. My phone has GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo capability.

Modern smartphones connect to at least three constellations these days (GPS, GLONASS and Galileo), but it‘s indeed become a term used to describe the entire family of technologies. The technical term would be GNSS (global navigation satellite system).

GPS is just the US Space Force network.

iPhones support GPS, Galileo (ESA), GLONASS (Roscosmos), QZSS (JAXA) and so-called assisted GPS – location computed from cell towers.

Assisted GPS is not (solely) the wifi/cell tower triangulation, it’s a technology that provides the receiver with an up to date GNSS satellite ephemeris to reduce time to first fix from minutes to seconds.

A-GPS/A-GNSS is orthogonal to cell site triangulation. It uses the data connection to fetch information to augment the satellite radio signals.

GPS has always been a generic term, the american GPS system was always actually known as NAVSTAR GPS (but usually called "the GPS").

In the space industry (specifically, the part of the industry that writes academic papers on global navigation), "GNSS" is used as the generic term, GPS means the American GPS.

People call the tiny display with underpowered computers that they buy and attach to their car's dashboard "GPS"...

Most devices also support GLONASS these days, because Russia passed a law that you can't sell any devices there that support GPS and not GLONASS

iPhone could have teleport technology and I would still not buy it due to iOS 15's privacy concerns.

Because google phone is so much better? Even if you remove the google suite, it's still very much the wild wild west of privacy whenever you install an app.

There are other non-mainstream mobile platforms, not just iOS and Android.

Sure, they are not yet as polished as those where a cult like controll freak or a private data merchant dump a lot of money, but one has to start somewhere.

In economics terms, my preferences are not complete. You can look it up if you bother to understand why "if A is bad, I don't necessarily buy the alternative B".

but if you ever got enough false positives that the police knock down your door you could just use the teleport feature to get the hell out of there!

Not if Apple and the police know your destination!

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