Is there an Apple Visits Location Service equivalent? - android

I'm looking to create an app for Android that checks a users location history to draw some conclusions of their daily life and identify behavioural patterns.
The Visits Location Service for IOS seems perfect for this kind of work as it logs location history separately, and then allows apps to access that data, but I'm struggling to find an equivalent for Android. I've looked into different Google API's, but nothing seems to fit the description very well - ideally, I could use the data already gathered by Google Timeline in order to avoid having the application active all the time, but so far I haven't found any way to access that data.
So, is there any equivalent for Android?

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Talking with App between Multiple Devices

I am developing an app which can be used for sharing location between 2 or more devices. One can be a publisher and other can be a subscriber. I got the first part done where I have an app which can read current lat-long from the device.
The second part is to publish it a repository (which is accessible on the internet to other devices also) so that other devices which subscribed to feeds of this device, will get such values and then render location on their devices. i.e. Bus Sending it location and people can subscribe to it to check when it will come near their home so that they leave office to reach bus stop just before 5 mins left for the bus to arrive at their stops.
I am looking where can be the best place to put such date where many devices can read and write (kind of online cache) for my application.
Maybe something like Firebase Realtime Database. Google Cloud Storage is not a good backend for something like this since it doesn't provide synchronization, and it would be hard to separate and authorize access to this privacy sensitive data.

How to manage big data for iOS app that displays location of all its users

I need to develop an iOS (and pref also compilable as Android) app that keeps track of the GPS coordinates of all its users, along with other properties.
Everybody needs to be able to see the the location of every other person on a map and search based on profile characteristics.
I am trying to get an idea of the best architecture of this. Would it be possible to just create a local app that works with a remove sql database? Would that be scalable enough? Or would I need some kind of backend processing?
I know software like PhoneGap can connect the App to a backend website with RESTful API. My question is mainly about what technique to use to handle the live/big data stream. Could mysql handle this?
Having every user be capable of viewing other user's locations will require a centralized backend, ala AWS/Parse(RIP)/Kinvey etc etc.

Inform the user about the terms for using the Android app

I have never used Google store before to publish an app and I hope someone will advice me how can I manage the following problem.
I am implemnting an Android app to display the bus location in my city in Google maps view based on Crowd sourcing. The data (lat, long, mac, speed, time, etc.) is being recorded in the background and transmitted to the server. The MAC address is used as identifier for the requester at the server side and I am storing it in the database tables as long as the background tracking service runs.
To use the app, the user has to agree this term when installing the app.
my question: Can I manage this work with google store for example in the Full description area or some where els to get this confirmation from the users or I have to implement the installation process by myself?
There are a lot of users who don't usually read the description, so it's not good to paste the terms in there.
The best way is to show the terms on the first launch of the application.

Get location of other people in Google Maps

I'm developing an Android app that tracks a number of people through GPS with their legal consents.
For some reason, I can't seem to find any related topics in Google or maybe I just can't construct the right words.
Google Maps and others are already setup. I only need the approximated LatLngs and some basic infos from those people in-track.
Where do I start? or any recommended links?
If you're tracking multiple people with their consent, then I'm assuming that your app is running for each of the users on their individual device(s). If that's the case, use the Android geolocation API to get the device's LatLong and publish it to a backend on the cloud periodically (say every minute or so to avoid too many writes to the backend). You can use a key/value storage to store the coordinates, where the keys are the user identifiers, and the value is the last lat/long (I'd also suggest storing a timestamp for the last update to allow for identifying stale data).
You can then query/subscribe to the backend to retrieve the last lat/long of (a) specific user(s), and then use it to create a custom marker on the GMap API.
We're working on a platform that uses a similar logic but for a different use-case, calculating proximity to specific locations and providing actions based on the proximity.
I hope this helps. We're using Ionic/Angular for our build platform so we're using PhoneGap API's to access the GeoLocation services of the device.
As far as I know you can do below things,
If the two uses have the same application, they should push their location (obtained from the Cell ID or GPS) to a Web Server (which you will handle). You can then exchange the location coordinates using your web-service.
For reference, have a look at this link :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms980225.aspx#v35go_topic2
Another the thing which I want to recommend you why don't you try to do this using google+ apis. Little googling will help you.

Should I Use Login Based User Authentication in my Android App

I am writing a basic app that interacts with a webservice I'm writing using AppEngine. I was wondering what the repercussions are of using login based authentication and managing users individually on the server side.
I know the business benefits of knowing your users and since I plan to eventually have some user generated content in the service, I realize I will eventually have to add it.
Right now, I'm concerned more about the technical aspects of adding this feature. What are the development and maintenance costs of adding these services right now versus adding them at a later point in time i.e. when the datastore is already populated with some 'anonymous' data and not user histories are kept ?
I know this is a vague question so I'll try to quantize the situation. Let's say we have an app that allows users to search the surrounding area for restaurants. The app only needs to send to the service the type of restaurant, say 'Chinese' ? The app is popular and gets a 100k users. Now we want to add a favorites system. Would we have been better off adding it from the start or is it better to wait to get some user and then add features ?
An underlying concept here is also the value that users attribute to a personalized experience and it would be great to get some insights from experienced App developers.
It seems feasible to build your system from the ground up using an internal unique identifier to segment user data. To start, just use the device's unique identifier to authenticate, then add a login-based scheme later.
I recently rolled my own api-based authentication system using GAE, and one of my biggest regrets has been not biting the bullet and doing it sooner. That said, if the context warrants (ie you want to test out a concept and see how well it resonates), I'd say you are safe going with an extendable approach, like the one I've described.

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