android - LocationAvailability No Location Available

Question

Google's FusedLocationProviderApi for Android was recently deprecated within the past few months, with FusedLocationProviderClient being its successor so I recently updated the location APIs used in my client's app to use the new ones.

Every time onLocationAvailability is fired in LocationCallback I notify the user when locationAvailability.isLocationAvailable() returns false, but it appears that this condition occurs more often than I expected on some devices. I run these location updates inside a foreground Service and it is crucial that these location updates remain consistent. Is there a way to determine the cause of this failure so

1. We don't indicate any false positives to the end-user
2. We can try to fix the issue or at least report to the end-user what they should do?

It appears to me that either the deprecated APIs provide more insight into these issues since it was used in conjunction with GoogleApiClient or perhaps I'm missing some smaller details.

Answer 1

As official documentation says:

onLocationAvailability Called when there is a change in the availability of location data. When isLocationAvailable() returns false you can assume that location will not be returned in onLocationResult(LocationResult) until something changes in the device's settings or environment. Even when isLocationAvailable() returns true the onLocationResult(LocationResult) may not always be called regularly, however the device location is known and both the most recently delivered location and getLastLocation(GoogleApiClient) will be reasonably up to date given the hints specified by the active LocationRequests.

So this method does not provide information about reason.

1. We don't indicate any false positives to the end-user

   • Currently I just ignore result of this method because it returns false too often, and then again true, and so on.

2. We can try to fix the issue or at least report to the end-user what they should do?

   • Check if Location Services are enabled (using LocationManager.isProviderEnabled())

   • Check if you have permissions, request them if needed (docs)