Why does UT not have assisted GPS?

RapidRotator

I have an open source Bangle.js smart watch with assisted GPS. On a PostmarketOS phone I use geoclue with:

[wifi]:
enable=true
url=https://beacondb.net/v1/geolocate

in the settings to get fast WiFi-enabled GPS. So hence my question: why is badly perfoming GPS mentioned as a caveat with every phone, while this is perfectly possible to do in Linux?

Is it simply that nobody had the time yet?

MrT10001

@RapidRotator said in Why does UT not have assisted GPS?:

Is it simply that nobody had the time yet?

That is the most likely reason. For an OS with apps developed by and with a community, not everything will or can be done. That is also to say that it could be done in the future.

RapidRotator

@MrT10001 That's great to hear. I really hoped there wasn't some technical problem in UT preventing this. I'll look into it then.

MrT10001

@RapidRotator If you can do something like this, please do contribute. At the moment it is way above my brain grade.

gpatel-fr

@RapidRotator said in Why does UT not have assisted GPS?:

I'll look into it then

you can begin with this issue
You'll note that there is a privacy concern too; if UT devs were ready to trample it, it would be easier.

flohack

HI, I am with UT since 2015/16 and we have discussed this topic a lot. The main blockers are:

aGPS solely relying on cell tower coordinates is feasable for a certain range of devices, but not all of them. Its a feature deeply buried in the firmware of the phone and exposed via Android blobs where we have not much influence if it really works or not
aGPS via WLAN AP names which is used by Android a lot is a simple matter of cost: There are no free databases and so we would need to charge for that in some way (or, maybe we could allow inserting your own token somehow, and you pay for yourself). But technically challenging.

We often take stuff on Android and iOS to be free for granted, but keep in mind that their cloud services require a lot of money to be operated on dedicated hardware and utilizing databases of other 3rd parties, and this is simply too much of a burden for a small OS project.

The same BTW goes for maps and navigation, though we got this currently nicely covered.

projectmoon

@flohack BeaconDB is free? And ready to be used with Geoclue.

Mario.CH

Hi projectmoon,

The beacondb.net website states, among other things:

"usage:
please note that beaconDB is experimental and may be inaccurate or unreliable
as beaconDB is starting from scratch there is likely no wifi coverage for your area.
if beaconDB can’t estimate your location using wifi, it will fallback to an approximate cell tower
location sourced from MLS’ final data dump, or an IP-based estimate as a last resort. note that
submissions will take at least 5 minutes to become available in the beaconDB API."

So again, something that is still in its early stages.

And by the way, what do you mean by free?
In any case, it should always be borne in mind that behind there is work involved.

My slogan is something like: Have you already paid all your donations for the year 2026?

Greetings
Mario

projectmoon

@Mario.CH By free, I mean you can change a config value in the geoclue config to point to BeaconDB, and it will work (insofar as their data is accurate), and no one will send you a bill.

Edit: And BeaconDB has been around for a few years now, so their coverage is actually quite good in denser areas.

flohack

@projectmoon well ok then, just needs someone that implements it then

RapidRotator

@flohack Atm it's quite busy because of the year-end with my kids (school, music performances, etc.), but between Christmas and new year I can remount the needed directories writeable and see if I can install and configure mmcli and geoclue to see if I can get those working on UT

flohack

@RapidRotator that would be great. I guess its not so straightforward but maybe we are lucky

gpatel-fr

@RapidRotator

while I'm no expert, I am taking a fleeting interest in these questions currently, and I can point you to an ooooold doc emerging from the mist of times:

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/questing/man2/lomiri-location-service.2.html

you'll notice that at some pre-historical point, the lomiri location service was written to allow to inject geoclue data into location info provided to applications. Is it still the case now, I have no idea. Looking at the service daemon command line (using ps) it's clear that it is not configured to do so currently.
I don't have the energy to try to hack the service to change the startup parameters accordingly - my hopes that it would just work are very low (if it was so easy, why would the UT devs not have done it already ?)

Eric H

@flohack I quickly tested Geoclue on Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x/daily with success.

Setup
- I installed geoclue-2-demo and its dependencies via apt (without recommended or suggested packages).
- I modified Geoclue’s configuration to use Positon
```
[wifi]
enable=true
url=https://api.positon.xyz/v1/geolocate?key=test
```
  I also tested BeaconDB using:
```
url=https://beacondb.net/v1/geolocate
```
Test
To verify it worked:
I started the agent in the background:
```
/usr/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/agent &
```
Then I ran the test command:
```
 /usr/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/where-am-i
```
Results
With Positon: obtained a fix very quickly (~5 s). The coordinates are correct.
With BeaconDB: the fix is also quick, but the returned coordinates are incorrect.

Note: @vlad-nirky ran the same test on 24.04-2.x and reported similar results.

Eric H

Since a Geoclue2 plugin for Qt is preinstalled with Ubuntu Touch, I tested it as well.

Setup

I modified GPS ToolKit to use Geoclue2 instead of lomiri-location.
I disabled GPS ToolKit’s apparmor confinement.

Test

I started the Geoclue agent in the background from a terminal set to "prevent app suspension":
/usr/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/agent &
I launched GPS ToolKit.

Result
I obtain fixes within a few seconds (~5 s).

gpatel-fr

@Eric-H said in Why does UT not have assisted GPS?:

With Positon: obtained a fix very quickly (~5 s). The coordinates are correct.

from https://positon.xyz/docs/

We currently do not expect to continue our operations beyond the year 2025

Eric H

@gpatel-fr said in Why does UT not have assisted GPS?:

We currently do not expect to continue our operations beyond the year 2025

Yes, Positon is intended as a temporary offering.
Please note that I do not recommend using Positon, BeaconDB, or even Geoclue 2 — I am only testing them