Power-efficiency: Minimizes your application’s usage of power. Usually this information is readily available, you just have to ask for it. Instead, you specify high-level needs, such as “high accuracy” or “low power”, and it will take a suitable approach.Īvailability: Gives your app immediate access to the best, most recent known location.

Simplicity: Unlike the previous API, you no longer have to deal with multiple providers. Some of the advantages of using this API over the previous one are: It provides the best accuracy based on our needs. Google Location Services API, also known as FusedLocationProviderApi, is Google’s recommended way of getting a user’s location. It offers a simpler API with higher accuracy, low-power geofencing, and much more. To improve developer experience with location based system services and ease the process of developing location-aware applications, Google introduced a new way of requesting a user’s location using Google Play Services. The APIs provided by this package are fairly low-level, and require the developer of the application to handle the finer details of determining when to request location data and schedule calls to the API in an optimized way. You might then make an attempt to increase accuracy by listening for a better location fix using the GPS_PROVIDER. Ideally you obtain the first location using NETWORK_PROVIDER, which might not be as accurate, but is much faster. When you are looking for user location you have to play with these providers and their availability. LocationManager.NETWORK_PROVIDER: Determines location based on availability of nearby cell towers and WiFi access points. Depending on the conditions, this provider may take a while to return a location fix. LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER: Determines location using satellites. The package provides two means of acquiring location data: These services allow applications to obtain periodic updates of the device’s geographical location. The package “android.location” has been available since Android was first introduced, and it gives us access to location services. When developing Android applications, there are a couple of ways to get the user’s location. In this article, we are going to build a simple Android application to determine the user’s latitude and longitude using Android’s Google Location Services API.

Android location services gradle