How does one monitor location in the background on Android these days?
We were using a foreground service to do this but with the changes in Android 12 and 13 this does not seem like the right way to achieve continuous location updates and seems like we are getting crashes. Fatal Exception: android.app.ForegroundServiceStartNotAllowedException: startForegroundService() not allowed due to mAllowStartForeground false:
Our use case is:
app integrates with a bluetooth speaker and when a button is pressed on the speaker an event is triggered in the app. The app calculates a distance and sends that back to the speaker to be announced. We are calculating the position between the phone and another known location (LatLng). So we need to keep track of the users current position in order to calculate the distance at any point in time. A user could be doing this for a couple hours without opening their phone.
I have been trying to find good resources on how to monitor location in the background but is a bit tricky to find any resources that take into account the recent changes from the OS and newer Android APIs.
It seems like WorkManager would be an appropriate solution but I am not sure about hitting work restrictions when trying to monitor location for an extended time.
Any and all help / resources appreciated.
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I have a small test App that with an Android GPS API map fragment. I use FusedLocationProvider. TarketSDK=29. Using Java.
As long as the app is active it works beautifully. On locationUpdates, I add a new point to the track and everything looks great and stays accurate. The goal is to track my hike, total distance and track and show it on the map. Works great.
As soon I lock my phone or loses focus, then the updates stop and I no longer get location updates.
Solution seems to be:
Background Service (discouraged)
Foreground Service
PendingIntent
I have poured over the docs, StackOverflow, all examples/tutorials I can find, developer.android.com, etc. I have downloaded examples of the latter 2 from GitHub; they seem incredibly obtuse (probably just me).
What are the dis/advantages of ForegroundService vs PendingIntent?
How about a bare-bones example illustrating the min features of each to implement location updates while your phone is locked in your pocket or some other app is active? Just the template minimum.
I need to save the locationUpdates that occur while my app is not active or phone is locked; in order to fill in Track when activity is restored to the app.
Some simple end-to-end guidance from my working app to something that will maintain locationUpdates and save the data would be great.
Ok - I have answered my question in a roundabout way.
I had been Searching on "retrieving location updates when app is not active". This lead to the various solutions of background service, foreground service, pendingIntents, etc.
I eventually found that if you just start a Foreground Service with a Notification, even if your phone is locked or you switch active apps, your App continues to receive LocationUpdates; as the Foreground Service runs in the same thread and therefore activates your app code (if I understand the reasons why correctly).
So, I started searching on just how to start a Foreground Service. As anyone knows that has tried to figure this out lately, this has changed more than a couple times over recent versions. The online docs at developer.android.com are not up to date. You will spend a lot of time wondering why things do not work following these docs.
Eventually, with just searching on how to start a foreground service, I came across this simple and straightforward (non-youtube-video - don't you just hate those things) tutorial. https://androidwave.com/foreground-service-android-example/
I just added this code to my existing Mapping code that works when the app is active, and tested with locking the phone and putting it in my pocket and switching apps and doing the same. It appears to solve the problem.
Update: Added code to count number of location updates and average accuracy of each update holding the phone in hand, screen on and app active as the baseline. Phone locked, or App not active no difference in number of updates nor accuracy. Phone locked and in pocket, no difference in number of updates, but accuracy suffered by from an average of 10m to an average of 13m; to be expected I assume whilst in the pocket.
after researching the Android Location FusedLocationProviderClient I am very confused about what you should and should not do!
The use case is: The App holds different locations with latitude and longitude. While the user is walking around the app (with the phone in the pocket, screen off) needs to track if he is close to one of the locations and plays a short beep when closer than a defined range.
Would the Geofence option the best solution? These locations will also change during runtime and periodically - they might also be more than 100. Any suggestion?
I am also thinking about a background service to handle all this when the device moves. This would be more flexible and allows for the reload of the locations as well. Any thoughts?
Thanks!!
You don't actually need to build a background service to monitor if a user is close to a location. There is already a geofence provided by Google. It uses fusedlocation provider internally.
Please refer this
You can combine this with a FusedLocationProviderClient and subscribe to location updates. This way you'll get location updates as well.
I have a big problem with an Android application that I developed.
The purpose of the application (for business) is to track the position of the device continuously (24 hours on 24) detecting a GPS track on a regular interval, which will then be synchronized to the server to the unleashing of certain events.
Of course, over time the device in and out of buildings, acquiring and losing the GPS signal continuously.
Often the device is not used and remains in office for several hours inside the company headquarters without GPS signal. During the course of time the Android system continues to provide me constantly getLastKnowLocation
My problem is that after some time that the system is running, sometimes two or three days, sometimes more days, my app starts to receive from the system always the same coordinates, regardless of who is in the open or at closed. From what I understand the Android operating system no longer seems able to update his coordinates and It will always return the same getLastKnowLocation indefinitely.
My App therefore becomes useless.
You know how I can fix this?
Is there any process that Android can restart in order for the system to wake up. In My App I will acquire any permission, except for root permissions.
For now the only control that I put, and that if the system always gives me the same identity for a number of seconds I call the method requestLocationUpdates of the location manager again.
But I need something more robust, to give me a better guarantee of operation. I'd like to be sure as possible that the systems try really to get updated coordinates.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe I can ask the system to restart some process so that the Location Manager, is fully reset. Can I do this? What is the process to be killed?
Can you think of any other solution or you found yourselves in this issue?
Thank you.
I'm trying to know when your device leaves your home, but I don't need fine GPS location nor high update rate (i.e. it's fine if I know the user is out only 10 minutes after he left his home and he's already 100 meters away).
Which of the two solutions should use less battery (both should use already less battery than plain GPS location listener)?
Receiving Location Updates | Android Developers with PRIORITY_BALANCED_POWER_ACCURACY
Creating and Monitoring Geofences | Android Developers
The first is for sure using a more battery saving solution and I can control the frequency to be low.
The second is a higher level API which does just what I want but I've no idea what it does and it looks like it'll use fine GPS location constantly while the user is within the geofence (remember I want to reduce battery usage).
Anyone has some insight on this regarding mostly battery usage?
The answer here might be a combination of things. The Location and battery Drain video explains more about how the GPS & Location chips burn up battery in your device. (Battery Drain and Networking will detail how the Radio chips work.)
Basically, using a FusedLocationProvider will allow you to scale back accuracy vs. power drain. Basically less-resolution results in less battery drain.
Knowing that, I'd suggest a set of low-power checks as early-warnings before moving to the higher-power checks:
Use ConnectivityManager to determine if the mobile device is on the CellularNetwork or not. If they are, there's a good chance they've moved outside of the wifi boundries.
Check if the WiFi they are connected to is the common home WiFi (so you don't mistake the coffeeshop wifi as home).
Use a back-off system on your checks. If the user is home, chances are, they will be there for a while; so scale back how often you check position.
If the user is on Cell network, use a Course Location to determine if you're within 100ft of your known home location.
Use a Fine location check to resolve issues / corner cases with the Course Location check.
When all else fails, do a Geo Fencing check; but then turn it off as soon as you've resolved the issues.
Basically, you want the least-power draining options to run the most often, and only use the most power-draining when you're resolving discrepancies in position.
There are a few hints in the documentation that Google wants you to use the Geofencing (or the new Awareness API) for your use case.
The first method need to be triggered from a LocationRequest, and from
https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/android/gms/location/LocationRequest
Activities should strongly consider removing all location request when entering the background (for example at onPause()), or at least swap the request to a larger interval and lower quality.
This shows that this API is designed to be used only when your application is active, hence the "Request" term.
Google soon realized that a lot of apps (including their own Google Now) are requesting for location in the background, and they want to improve it in such a way that the requests can be pooled and shared, hence they created Geofencing and eventually Awareness API.
From the Fence API document,
https://developers.google.com/awareness/overview#fences_and_snapshots
Fence API lets your app react to the user's current situation, and provides notification when a combination of context conditions are met. For example, "tell me whenever the user is walking and their headphones are plugged in". Once a fence is registered, the Fence API can send callbacks to your app even when it's not running.
So, in your use case, if your app is not running, you should be using the second method.
My final goal is to calculate how much time a user is spending at a specific location. Therefore I would like to make the application aware of when a user arrives and leaves a specific location, so I can calculate the time spent there.
Is there a way to get notified when a user arrived at specific location and leaves it in Android and iOS? It does not need to be instant, one-two minutes of miscalculation are fine.
Thank you in advance!
On Android platform, your can try the Geofencing API introduced at Google I/O 2013
Within the API document, they provide a good example project.
And for iOS it's called (surprisingly) Location Services - what you need is the Region Monitoring.