Why does UT not have assisted GPS?

[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.

1. 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
     

2. 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
   

3. 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.

1. Setup

• I modified GPS ToolKit to use Geoclue2 instead of lomiri-location.

• I disabled GPS ToolKit’s apparmor confinement.

2. 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.

3. 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

[matteo]

@Eric-H thanks for your pointer and feature testing. What you did seems very encouraging and may eventually fill this long standing lack of UT. I hope this will lead to some sort of integration specifically with PureMaps. Let's see what it gets.

[kan-ibal]

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

Is it still the case now, I have no idea.

There is geoclue provider for lomiri-location-service. Provider can be set in

/home/phablet/.local/usr/libexec/lxc-android-config/lomiri-location-serviced-wrapper

as

--provider geoclue::Provider

and it does not work with geoclue-2.
I have gpsd tested with external bt receiver and gpsd provider works.

[Eric H]

@kan-ibal
I also wanted to try the geoclue provider, but I didn't find a .deb/apt package in UT 24.04-1.x to install geoclue 1.
That's why we only tested geoclue 2.
(I tried to make it work also with the remote provider, without success)

[gpatel-fr]

As an update, a draft MR was recently posted on Gitlab using the BeaconDB api (directly,not via Geoclue)