• GrapheneOS@grapheneos.socialOP
      1·
      4 days ago

      @[email protected] Apple’s service is better for our purposes because it provides the Wi-Fi AP and cell tower location data for the area which can be locally cached in memory. It also means we had to implement a local algorithm for determining the location based on it. Apple’s API enables us to scrape their service for data to build our own database by crawling through the data. Google’s service would currently work better because the algorithm is smarter than ours but we can improve it to work as well.

      • GrapheneOS@grapheneos.socialOP
        1·
        4 days ago

        @[email protected] Since we have a local algorithm already, we’ve already a lot of the way towards implementing entirely offline network location support. We just need to provide a database based on scraping Apple’s data for local queries of networks and networks near those. We already have the code to calculate the position from it locally. Google’s service does the calculation on their service which prevents mass scraping the data in a similar way and also prevents short term offline use via a cache.