Recently, I got a complaint letter from a user of our weather category app RadarNow! regarding our new NWS Alert feature. This feature sends out NWS Alerts based on the user's location. RadarNow! notifies the backend its location and the backend reverse geocodes that location into a state and county. NWS Alerts are issued by the county.
The user's complaint was that he and his wife, both with identical phones, were receiving different alerts. In theory, they should be receiving the same as they are in the same location and again, in theory, the same county. After some investigation, the issue turned out to be due to the accuracy of the Network Location feature in Android. Both users had accuracies of over 2,500 meters. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but they also lived in a border area and one that's rural. Rural areas have more errors in location that highly populated ones. The fixes must have been based on different cell towers and because they're right on the border of Nevada and Arizona, that calculated out to one user being in Arizona and the other in Nevada. Naturally, that meant to RadarNow!'s backend that they were in different counties so different sets of alerts were sent to each of them. Is this a feature or a bug? There's always a trade off between accuracy and latency in regard to location fixes. For the radar display, 2500 meters is acceptable For most users, that would be the case as well. For these people, it wasn't. So in a way, it's a bug in that it allowed the backend to calculate them incorrectly into different counties. On the other hand, it's a feature in that we take the fastest possible fix and avoid GPS to improve response time and decrease battery usage. GPS is only used when Network location isn't available. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-discuss/-/FnHNlDMFXMkJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
