Comment by culturestate
4 years ago
> the unintuitive part is that “location” means “Wi-Fi scan”
I was under the impression that this has been SOP for mobile device location forever: get rough location via WiFi and/or tower multilateration while GPS is...I don't know the proper terminology here, bootstrapping? That's why your dot tends to start somewhere nearby-ish and then quicky jump to your exact location.
It's possible that I'm way off base or my understanding is outdated, though.
> I don't know the proper terminology here, bootstrapping?
There is the term "Time to first fix" Maybe "getting first fix" could be derived from that.
Wikipedia lists a set of interesting situations with what the device is actually doing that causes the delay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_first_fix
I'm thinking that my devices could have an offline list of known WiFi mac-addresses from when it's checked GPS before and return those for very accurate results without scanning anything.