Cordova Ionic Android Location Sometimes Not Accurate

Question

We use in Cordova with plugin "cordova-plugin-locationservices" Sometimes we get location that a few km away from real location. we call to "getCurrentPosition" with next options:

{ timeout: 60000, enableHighAccuracy: true, maximumAge: 0, }

Someone use in this plugin and use in another options or recommend on another plugin. At first we use "cordova-plugin-geolocation" with same options but it's also sometimes return not accurate position.

Answer 1

I've written extensively on this topic at https://breautek.com/articles/geolocation-accuracy.html

But to summarise there are a number of reasons why you aren't receiving the accuracy that you're after.

The two main contributors to inaccurate readings are 1) Settings & 2) The environment.

Natively, the GPS service operates in two modes: Fine location and coarse location. Fine location will allow you to get approximately up to 3-5 meter accuracy and is generally used if you require information such as the specific street. Coarse location gives you a very low accuracy reading that can only be useful to determine the location of the user's state or country.

Settings includes both programmatic settings, such as the enableHighAccuracy parameter, and they include User device settings, which is configurable by the user on based on their own location preferences.

The developer obviously has control over programmatic settings, and it looks like you're doing just that. However, the developer doesn't have access to change user preferences of the device. Just because the user has consented permission for your app to use location, doesn't mean they have location services actually enabled, or even configured to provide fine location. The specific settings can vary from device to device or by OS version to OS version. But generally speaking they usually have some sort of "Device/GPS only", and "High Accuracy" (sometimes labelled as "Bluetooth/Wifi/Mobile") setting for geolocation. It's the app's responsibility to handle these situations.

In my apps, I use the mixture of the cordova-plugin-geolocation as well as the third-party diagnostics plugin. With the diagnostics plugin, you can check if permission is granted, including for fine/precise location, as well if location services are indeed enabled.

Lastly, the second issue could be the environment. Even if the device is configured and the app has permission to use fine location, you still may not actually receive accurate readings. This can be caused purely based on the environment. Being located in a concrete office building for example hinders a lot of GPS capabilities.

It's recommended to pay attention to the accuracy field in your GPS callbacks, which will tell how confident the GPS service is that the given GPS point is accurate. The accuracy reading is in meters which tells you that the true location is within X meters radius of the given location. So in otherwords, the lower the number the better.