> Raw GPS is universally unusable, requiring up to half an hour of waving your phone under clear sky,
Sigh. The increasing amount of unsubstantiated FUD finding its way on to HN recently is depressing.
Two glaringly obvious points to make at your nonsense:
1. What you describe is ancient history. It applied to old previous-generation devices with single-frequency chipsets (L1 GPS signals). However, effectively 100% of devices released within the last 3–5 years (and more in the case of certain manufacturers !) (a) have L1,L2,L5 GPS chipsets and (b) have multi-frequency GPS chipsets whch work not only with the "original" GPS but also Galileo, QZSS and others.
2. Even if we accept your argument, which we should not, then the rapid adoption of Apple's FindMy network (and the equivalent for Google) surely cannot have escaped your attention ? These serve to increase accuracy.
The reality is there is fast becoming no need for a third-party service such as the one Mozilla provided, because there is now first-class support for sufficiently robust high-accuracy positioning.
It's you who doesn't make much sense in this thread.
> released within the last 3–5 years
So, pretty much only the very fresh devices then.
> have L1,L2,L5 GPS chipsets
That's not going to reduce cold TTFF to seconds without online assistance (which, by the way, is not what MLS is about).
> work not only with the "original" GPS but also Galileo, QZSS and others
Same as above. None of the constellations or assistance data help when you can't see the sky.
> then the rapid adoption of Apple's FindMy network (and the equivalent for Google) surely cannot have escaped your attention
How is it relevant and how can it be used by anyone who isn't Apple or Google?
> The reality is there is fast becoming no need for a third-party service such as the one Mozilla provided
The reality is that I'm not aware of any currently existing alternatives to MLS that could be used by Geoclue or microG, which provide non-GNSS location on many phones out there, which is essential to provide anything resembling a good user experience when it comes to location. The opposite of what you said is true - there's a rapidly growing need for this kind of service as more FLOSS starts to be used on mobile phones.
> How is it relevant and how can it be used by anyone who isn't Apple or Google?
It is relevant because most people on the planet are not like you.
Most people on the planet use Apple, Google or indeed both.
Meanwhile, services such as the one Mozilla used to offer cost time and money to maintain. There's servers to maintain, software to maintain, CDN bills to pay.
If your user base is effectively a bunch of die-hard anti-Apple, anti-Google people, then its not worth the time or effort.
We are afterall, talking about location services here, not e.g. email where sure there's a market for non-Apple, non-Google.
For location services in 2024 there is little reason for people to not use what their device comes with, frankly.
Ah, okay. So you have no idea what you're talking about and don't care about what we're discussing here then, thanks for clarifying. There are devices that don't come from Apple or Google at all that rely on MLS and need a location service, regardless of whether you believe it's worth the effort or not.
> the rapid adoption of Apple's FindMy network (and the equivalent for Google) surely cannot have escaped your attention ? These serve to increase accuracy.
Do you mean Apple's and Google's Wi-Fi positioning databases? These are different from Find My: Find My is crowdsourced positioning of (themselves usually unconnected) trackers; the positioning databases are (at least partially) crowdsourced Wi-Fi (and maybe Bluetooth) signal to location mappings.
This is correct. I use GPS in RC planes and only the initial sync is that slow (when it has to download the ephemerides). Subsequent boots/syncs only take a few seconds, and you obviously get great resolution with just the GPS unit.
I'm assuming you're using a UBlox M8 or F9P or something similar? Most of the built units have a small battery or supercap that allows them to retain almanac and ephemeris data while powered off. If the ephemeris data is less than 4 hours old this will allow it to very quickly re-sync to the visible SVs and get a lock again.
It's quite impressive, though, at how the hardware has improved. For a complete cold start one of the challenging issues is to actually find a single satellite to listen to. For GPS there's 32 different spreading codes and each transmitted signal is affected by Doppler shift depending on its position and velocity relative to where you are on the Earth. You basically have to iterate through (spreading code, Doppler shift) pairs and run a correlator to see if there's a signal present. Contemporary hardware has a ton of correlators that can run in parallel which can significantly improve the TTFF (time to first fix). As soon as you find one SV and start to get a bit of almanac data you can quickly eliminate (spreading, Doppler) options from the problem space by dropping SVs that you know are not going to be visible.
I use the Mozilla location services to have my Linux desktops and laptops automatically figure out where they are in order to properly apply blue-light filtering at night. How might one be able to integrate either the aforementioned Apple or Google services into the system to provide the appropriate location data? Or would it instead require the purchase of separate GPS units for these computers in order to have them know just where they are?
Dismissal of Mozilla being forced to bring down an essential service like this because the concerned post has some FUD in it, and that proprietary alternatives exist so what's the worry, is frankly disgusting. Especially when it's done via the blatantly immortal (but technically legal!) abuse of the legal system like this.
And it's not even FUD. The phone I use has no working GPS since it got degoogled, as it takes too long to get a poosition. Yes, it's older than 3 years, but maybe being able to integrate the mozilla location service (with something more adequate than LineageOS) was a factor in me thinking the ungoogled Android route was viable anyway. But here we are.
I have a watch that I don't connect to my phone that gets GPS signal and lat lon and it works better than you describe. You made general claims despite your situation being specific to you - intentional or not, that's FUD.
Is that watch de-googled, running only with FOSS software, without a proprietary location service? How it the AGPS system mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39725522 working, who provides the data? Was it stale?
If you can't answer that or if it's backed by (recently acquired) proprietary data, then you just do not know how GPS behaves in the scenario we are talking about.
Sigh. The increasing amount of unsubstantiated FUD finding its way on to HN recently is depressing.
Two glaringly obvious points to make at your nonsense:
1. What you describe is ancient history. It applied to old previous-generation devices with single-frequency chipsets (L1 GPS signals). However, effectively 100% of devices released within the last 3–5 years (and more in the case of certain manufacturers !) (a) have L1,L2,L5 GPS chipsets and (b) have multi-frequency GPS chipsets whch work not only with the "original" GPS but also Galileo, QZSS and others.
2. Even if we accept your argument, which we should not, then the rapid adoption of Apple's FindMy network (and the equivalent for Google) surely cannot have escaped your attention ? These serve to increase accuracy.
The reality is there is fast becoming no need for a third-party service such as the one Mozilla provided, because there is now first-class support for sufficiently robust high-accuracy positioning.