Provide an indication whether GPS is in use and the status/quality of the fix

[Pat McGowan]

Useful information for the user to understand whether a god fix is available or not
Perhaps a colored dot on the icon

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Alan Bell (alanbell)]

might also help bug #1551683 where photos get incorrectly geotagged because there is no GPS fix, if the user knows in advance the location is junk they can run an application that gets a fix prior to taking photos and can know when the fix is good.

[Alberto Mardegan (mardy)]

From bug 1509260 (which I'm now setting as a duplicate of this one):

According to the latest design, the location indicator will be shown if an application has accessed the location in the last 5 minutes. However, this doesn't tell whether a location has actually been obtained or not.

Use case: I'm walking and I start a map application. If no internet connection is available, location will be provided by the GPS only, but that can take about 20 minutes.
So, every few minutes I'll check my phone to see if it has got a location: if this information was available from the indicator, I would not even bother unlocking the phone if I know that a fix has not been obtained.

This is especially useful in cold weather: you wouldn't need to take your gloves off just to check if a location has been obtained.

[Alberto Mardegan (mardy)]

Bug 1536774 is also similar to this one.