I read in the documentation that I can setup geofencing so I know when the user entered/left the geofenced area.
However, I was wondering, can't I get the same behaviour by just taking my current location (ona regular location update) and check the distance with the center of the intended geofence. If it is less than a certain radius then I am within that area.
Wouldn't that have the same effect (infact way less code than geofence)?
Thank you
I believe the advantage of a geofence as opposed to what you describe, is that geofences are objects that come with a lot of extra support in Google Play Services. Using geofences allows multiple different Activities or even Applications to get notifications/callbacks from a single (or set of) geofence objects created elsewhere. These callbacks will happen automatically even if you are in another application because Google Play Services can monitor location in the background without you writing additional code in your Activity, and they can expire on their own. Doing this would be more difficult if you were to roll your own distance calculations as you would have to set it up your own Service framework.
From this answer by CommonsWare:
Geofences are designed to work even without your application running.
However, if your goal is only to check whether you are a certain distance from a geographical point (without caring about what happens when the user goes to check their email or puts their phone back in their pocket), then what you describe might be easier.
Related
There may be similar questions regarding this topic,But I need your thoughts and suggestions on some specific requirement.
Here is my need -
We are developing one app which tracks User's trip.
The app will start collecting the location of that user in background,When user 'Starts' his trip from App.Background Service will be fetching locations on the basis of user's movement in specific time duration.
When User 'Stops' his trip from App,We are calculating distance traveled by user with help of all recorded locations(With Google Distance calculating API).
The App works fine in ideal case.
But main challenge is -
In some scenarios,We are not able to fetch exact and precise location of User. Scenarios affecting is - No internet,Data plan with 2g/3g,some specific areas where GPS is not returning accurate data etc.
Incorrect data of lat-long causes incorrect Trip distance and route.Which is main problem with the App.
Please,any one can suggest the best alternative/Suggestion for this?
P.S. - We have tried GPS,Network,FusedLocationProvider.
EDIT 2 --
We have implemented logic on basis of accuracy and distances.Got nearer points. And just came across one useful api from Google that corrects some location points which are distracted from actual Roads. Posting here for reference of others...
Snap to Roads Api from Google
this is a complicated topic.
One consideration you have to take. Android Oreo limits background services and that what you want to achieve won't work.
I would do is this (and it is the recommendation from Google)
When someone starts the trip (the user is aware of it), you must launch a on going notification with a foreground service , don't rely on background services anymore. Check the feature "Start Activity" in Google Fit App.
As for not having signal, or accurate GPS, well... it is a geographical problem!, there is nothing you could do. Or, maybe you can, using the LocationProvider.
FusedLocationProvider is fused within every app that requests locations updates.
Read this out, and see if that helps you.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/location/strategies.html
Try to mix GPS and Accelerometer
If you detect that GPS stopped working, turn on accelerometer. If GPS is turned on again, calculate distance again with it. This way you can have route with GPS parts and accelerometer ones. The bigger GPS parts, the more accurate data will be
How to get more accuracy by GPS_PROVIDER
Basically if the accuracy of a location isn't acceptable throw it away. The next one will be better.
I know that there is a technique to update more than 100 geofence to google api client. But I want a complete solution to add more than 100 geofence or any library to achieve it. I already done my project using google api client. But there is limitation off 100 geofence only.
Is there any library or any other technique to update more than 100 geofence?
And all these process should run in background. I mean even after application process is killed, this should run in background. Is it possible?
Thanks in advance.
The issue with having more than 100 geofences is that depending on how close they are in proximity to the user and how many geofences you actually have, it can become a serious battery drain due to constant location polling. I'm not sure how you plan to implement your geofences, but I would suggest you look into loading only geofences within your immediate and surrounding area, storing the rest into a database, and loading/unloading depending on your current location and distance from the edge of the geofences. Bing came up with this nice tiling system that may come in handy for 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.
I am currently studying a possible project on Android and iPhone.
I need to know if geofences could help me, or if another method should be used.
I think the geofence are not used in this way but I ask anyway.
Is it possible to place a geofence on the current user location (even if it moves) and sending messages when other people come on the geofence position (even they are 100 000) ?
Thank you very much in advance for your answers.
It's do-able but you will be lagging a lot...you will have to get a strong server to get all the positions of the users at a given time and place a listener on each user location s.t. in case his geolocation gets into some geofence every listener should inform its listenee (which will probable be the user class), so far should be good BUT hypothetically 1 user can get into millions other geofences (indicating your start-up is running quite good...) which will require the server to send millions of alert, now think on a million users moving - that means that even if you send just their location you can end up moving a couple of tera-bytes in a second to the server and from it plus requiring it to make more than trillions actions (probabley push notifications?) per second...
It depends on many variables as: radius of your geofences, quantity of users, etc. Notice, that in normal life you never approach 100000 people at one time, well, maybe at the football game. I think nothing is impossible, but a lot of factors need to be reviewed.
Would it be possible to make an Android application that works based on location, for example when you get to work the app might turn off WiFi or Bluetooth or change any other system settings in order to save battery or something?
The app would require the user to enter in locations where they want the app to begin working, like their address, and when the phone sees that they have arrived at this location it will start working. I want to do this but I don't know where to start.
I already have some android app development experience.
Yes absolutely this is possible. I have worked on approx three application with same concept.
You need to create a center point and define a radius for the same.
Then you need to calculate the distance of you current location with that particular center point and if your distance is less than or equal to radius, trigger to switch on the services you want.
In android you can use
LocationManager class
For collecting the data. If you want some more help I can provide the same too.
I've played around with a concept like this on the Windows Phone for a while, and I think this would work for Android too.
Basically, you'd use the GPS of the device to detect your location, and then compare this to the locations saved by the user. If the location comes within range of a saved setting, perform an action.
GPS usage however drains battery, so you'd have to experiment a bit with making this an efficient method.
Have you tried GeoFencing, its really cool. It lets you define a center point, and a radius. Once the user enters this radius you get callback or a pendingIntent. You can do what you want in your callback.
You can get addresses of your customers and build geofence around their locations.
Edit :
If you choose to not use GeoFenceing (for what ever reason), note that LocationManager is highly buggy and unstable on most mobile phones (Samsung).
Instead use LocationClient, which takes care of all the crap LocationManager leaves with us to deal with and provides location faster, lesser battery and customized accuracy.
Edit :
If anyone tries to convince you otherwise, check this out. A video from google developers and their talk about why LocationManager sucks, and why they knew and helped us figure out the value Sensors add to the entire solution.
Edit : Design of your solution
You need 2 geofences
1) Outer, you can hard code this to a imaginary 500 m from office. From then on you can start looking for wifizones
2) Once a wifizone is found, save the gps and the distance from his address point. That is your inner radius.
1 Geofence is defined by your install, 2nd geofence is defined by your runtime.
2nd Geofence and be used henceforth to disable GPS (only incase you decide to use LocationManager). If not you wont need this, LocationClient will do what it does best.