Fused Location Provider Unexpected Behavior

Fused Location Provider unexpected behavior

For the questions specified,

1. is the fused location provider suppose to use GPS at all if it set to receive updates with PRIORITY_BALANCED_POWER_ACCURACY and don't have any WI-FI or cell towers info ? &
2. if it does, then what am I doing wrong?

Apparently no explicitly unique source is specified anywhere within documentation. With either PRIORITY options, even through code, the "source" of obtained location is "fused".

[location.getProvider() returns :"fused"]

I have seen GPS being used only when the LocationRequest has PRIORITY_HIGH_ACCURACY. So it does not use GPS under other conditions.

4. why GPS radio is opened all the time instead of been opened for the 10 minutes interval when I used the PRIORITY_HIGH_ACCURACY parameter? (I don't have other installed apps that triggers location updates faster..)

The fastest interval has been set for 1 minute. From what i understood, the setFastestInterval is given precedence over setInterval when the value for fastest interval is shorter in duration than the value of setInterval.

In your case, 1 minute against 10.

About not having other installed apps that triggers location updates, its just given as an example and not specified that only that case explicitly.

This controls the fastest rate at which your application will receive
location updates, which might be faster than setInterval(long) in some
situations (for example, if other applications are triggering location
updates).

So, what happens is with PRIORITY_HIGH_ACCURACY, it requests location on the fastest interval set - 1min, by using GPS(kind of exclusively).

3. why I'm getting this misleading location updates that are not correct? (as I explained in the the "even bigger problem" section..

Need to check the code for pendingIntent mechanism also. Though there could be a few things to take note of:

You can add a location.getTime() to ensure and verify the time of obtained location. Very likely it is not being updated, if there is no wifi-cell towers in range and PRIORITY_BALANCED_POWER_ACCURACY is used.

A block level accuracy of location on the first place, which is being used when "lastKnown" is called wouldn't help.

The battery consumption was because of the combination of GPS and 1 min updates. Try setting the fastest interval as 5 or 10 mins, if that is suitable for your implementation but PRIORITY_BALANCED_POWER may not help if you need absolutely accurate location. I normally add a check for the location obtained in onLocationChanged and depending on that, switch the priority in LocationRequest. It helps in, surely, obtaining a location generally, unless i am inside a building with no line-of-sight for GPS and Wifi-Network are off.

Fused location stops sending updates after several hours

setExpirationDuration(long millis)

from docs:

Set the duration of this request, in milliseconds.

The duration begins immediately (and not when the request is passed to the location client), so call this method again if the request is re-used at a later time.

The location client will automatically stop updates after the request expires.

The duration includes suspend time. Values less than 0 are allowed, but indicate that the request has already expired.

If you want to receive location updates forever, remove it or set appropriate time.

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