gps issues on xperia x [answered]

answered 2018-11-11 10:29:36 +0300

DrYak
9624 ●93 ●134 ●128

http://www.sympato.ch/

actually, GPS taking ages to lock is absolutely normal for a pure GPS because it needs to scan and find out where all the visible satellites are (unless you pre-upload the current week's tables. Stand alone SatNav like TomTom usually call that GPSfix).

solution: turn on assisting, like most other smartphones do (and satnav with Wifi/Bluetooth/3G) :

• Settings app -> connectivity section -> location
• in the location settings -> accuracy section -> switch the accuracy from device only mode to high accuracy position.

In this mode:

• Your smartphone will upload a list of all cell towers and all wifi access points it sees in its vicinity to Mozilla's cloud server.
• Using their giant database Mozilla can guess your approximate position (you'll instantly get a position within 100m)
• using available information, GPS bootstrapping is much faster, within a minute you'll lock enough satellites and get a good accurate positionning.

Again, keep in mind that you're uploading some information on the cloud (though unlike most Android phones, Sailfish uses Mozilla's cloud instead of Google's). Some might find the solution objectionable on privacy grounds.

• in the forums, you might find howto's to switch to another provider. (but all cloud based, I haven't heard of people implementing local databases, like microG does on Android)
• some people have tried to play with the Glonass capability of the Xperia,

I have no idea if its working, I'm personally very happy with the Mozilla cloud. It locks quite fast in the native apps I'm using (GPSInfo for controlling, PureMaps for navigation, Laufhelden for sport tracking, and OSM Scout server to provide offline maps to these last two)

Obviously this solution requires to have a data connection. It won't work when abroad if you don't have data roaming.