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.